Over the past few months, women in Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Israel have taken to social media to raise their voices about the rampant sexual harassment they are subjected to on a daily basis. In 2017, when the #MeToo movement took the world by storm, most Middle Eastern societies, despite having strong on-ground advocacy for women’s rights, were unaware of the movement or were unwilling to share their stories online. The resurgence of the online wave, however, indicates that women in the region are finally finding their voices and demanding tangible change in deeply patriarchal societies.
When the #MeToo movement first gained recognition, the hashtag and its equivalent in regional languages appeared only in small, elite pockets of Middle Eastern and North African countries. Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World Dr Lina Abirafeh in 2018 said that the movement was unable to make the kind of impact on Arab countries that did in the West, mainly due to the prevailing taboos and cultural norms present in these societies, as well as a general sense of apathy towards legal frameworks and expecting space for recourse. She also noted that the foremost correlation to the failure of the movement to take off in the region was women’s economic status, education levels, and level of access to the internet. For example, Dr Abirafeh noted that the #MosqueMeToo hashtag that became popular in Saudi Arabia as women came forward to speak of sexual violence in religious spaces, was not widespread and was concentrated to a certain class of women.
Another factor at play was a lack of awareness among government officials. For instance, Farah Mnekbi, a worker for the Tunisian government’s women’s research centre, was not familiar with the hashtag or the online movement even a year after it occurred. Rather, she said that the focus in the country was more towards organizations taking the lead on advocating for social and political reforms. Amidst this lack of prioritization by the government, who seemed unaware of the magnitude of the movement around the world, Tunisian women instead sought help through closed online groups and communities.
In more orthodox MENA states like Egypt, the situation is even more worrying. A 2013 study by the United Nations found that more than 99% of Egyptian women and girls reported having experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime, with 83% saying that they did not feel safe out on the streets. Simultaneously, only 6.6% of the victims felt comfortable to report the harassment to the police due to fear, guilt, and shame. The situation is pretty much the same across the region.
As feminist author Mona Eltahawy told France24, the Egyptian state has been ruled by a military-backed regime since 1952, and is an inherently predatory system. For example, the country’s former dictator, Hosni Mobarak, often sent state security to sexually assault female journalists and activists. Eltahawy noted that, even after the 2011 Arab Spring, the state continued to sexually violate women under the garb of virginity tests, which is in itself highly problematic.
Fast forward to 2020, however, and MENA is seeing a resurgence of the women’s rights movement, both in Egypt and the region at large.
A flood of accusations have taken over the Egyptian internet, triggering a new #MeToo like wave, with almost a hundred women naming a privileged student for harassing and assaulting them. Previously, rhetoric around sexual assault in the country insinuated that it was only a problem among less-privileged classes. But this also comes at a time when the el-Sisi administration is struggling to define its stance on women’s internet rights, with recent crackdowns and arrests of female influencers, mainly on TikTok, on charges based on a vague clause of “violating family values” present in the country’s 2018 cybercrime bill. Simultaneously, the Instagram account Assault Police, which is where most Egyptian women have come forward with their stories, was also banned several times and forced to shut down after its administrators received death threats.
For its part, the government has passed legislation in response to some of these concerns such as a new law which grants anonymity to victims of sexual abuse and harassment. However, experts like Eltahawy argue that the law does not go far enough, which is hardly surprising in a country where laws are written by a patriarchal system will always exist to serve and protect the patriarchy. That being said, she does believe that this online movement represents a ‘reckoning’ for women and LGBTQ communities who are finally breaking barriers and publicly naming assaulters.
In Iran, women have taken to the internet with numerous sexual assault allegations against the country’s most beloved and prominent celebrities, triggering the Shi’ite state’s first wave of a larger conversation around violence against women. The Persian hashtags #tajavoz and #tarozjensi, meaning rape and sexual attack, respectively, have been trending all over social media, forcing Iranian authorities to publicly respond to rape allegations and even arrest a perpetrator.
In the past, sexual assault cases in Iran have often been dealt with behind closed doors and presented to the public as if it rarely happened or was the victim’s fault. In fact, sexual assault is often linked to homosexuality and the high number of reported cases in Western countries has provided a scapegoat for Iranian authorities to otherize the problem as being one of moral degradation in non-Islamic societies. The issue is so deeply hidden that the government does not hold any official records or statistics on the number of reported sexual violence incidents in the country and has not published any data on conviction rates.
On the other hand, women can also face criminal charges in Iran for reporting rape, as state law criminalizes non-marital sexual relationships. In practice, courts require extremely high evidentiary standards to prove that women have been coerced, and the compulsory death penalty for a proven rape also deters survivors from reporting as they are made to carry that burden. The absence of legal recourse has led to the prevalence of immunity for harassers, but events over the past few weeks have shown that women are now more ready to defy existing norms to speak out against assault due to the anonymity and relative safety that the internet affords them.
Mahzad Elyassi, one of the first journalists to report on the #MeToo movement in Iran in 2017, said that her article had not really taken off at the time because Iranians believed that the movement was only for privileged white women. She points out that the current movement is breaking those norms and is even being inclusive of victims from varied socio-economic and political backgrounds, making it far more intersectional than the previous iteration of this movement.
But it isn’t only sexual violence against women that is compelling them to take speak out. In Turkey, the murder of a 27-year-old woman by her ex-boyfriend led to widespread protests against the government's inability to stop the country's endemic femicide issue. But, as soon as the movement gained popularity and support, Ankara announced that it would be withdrawing from the crucial Istanbul Convention that is aimed at ending gender-based violence, especially in the domestic sphere. Honour killings are so deeply rooted in Turkish society that, in 2019 alone, around 474 women were murdered by their relatives and partners; these figures only are expected to increase, since people are locked down in their homes due to the pandemic. Yet, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative government seems adamant on backing out from legislations that they believe ‘threaten traditional family values’. For example, lobby groups fighting for legal reformations on domestic violence for years have been shunned on the grounds that the Istanbul Convention encourages “immoral lifestyles” and divorce.
Conversely, in Israel, where women are more liberated than in other states in the region and have been tackling harassment head on at the institutional level, the 2017 #MeToo movement only bolstered ongoing efforts. The helpline at the Association of Rape Crisis Centres reported a 11% spike in calls after the movement went viral. Recently, the horrific gangrape of a teenage girl in a hotel room by over 30 perpetrators sparked immediate outrage on the internet, culminating in a new movement named 'More Than 30'. The campaign was successful in pressuring authorities to act promptly and to get them to paint over a ‘Peeping Tom’ mural outside a women’s restroom at a Tel Aviv beach. Yet, ultra-Orthodox communities, who are cut away from the mainstream, still treat sexual abuse as a sensitive issue that must not be discussed. Further, several activists believe that the country’s laws fail to match the gravity of the crime, with the maximum penalty for rape being 16 years. Most often, final sentences don’t exceed one year. Analysts believe that the glaring dearth of women in political positions are a major roadblock towards the country truly achieving laws that provide justice and equity to women.
But how sustainable can these movements be in conservative Arab societies where women are not seen as equals under law? Several experts are wary of the future— Egyptian Sociologist Ammar Ali Hassan shared his fear that the issue’s prevalence on social media is likely to dim out of the limelight when an equally eye-catching and compelling topic takes its place. For example, the recent black-and-white photo challenge campaign by Turkish women to protest the country’s endemic femicide problem was swiftly emulated by people across the globe, but was forgotten soon after. “We have had long-running issues that are not met with legislative, social or even religious resolutions, so they keep popping up again and again… Those issues stay unresolved and most people show no interest in them until a horrible incident happens, then it captures the public’s interest for a while before it disappears from the public sphere again,” Hassan said.
That being said, the new wave of movements have emerged as a crucial space for women to voice their concerns and usher an uncomfortable conversation waiting to be had in these countries. It is becoming increasingly obvious that women around the Middle East are becoming frustrated with the rules that govern them, in what Eltahawy calls an anticipated reckoning between the manifestations of their identities with the state, the public sphere, and their private lives. Unlike traditional forms of protest which have often led to backlash from state authorities, the internet has emerged as a relatively safer alternative for survivors to tell their stories, name their abusers, and find solidarity and support that may be otherwise missing from their immediate surroundings. By using their own language and creating their own spaces online, these women have reclaimed a movement that was otherwise perceived to be a Western-centric trend and made it their own. There is hope that this will create the space for more people to speak out, creating a cultural shift, if not legal reformation.