Danielle Plesser
SOC202
October 23, 2008, 4:55 PM
The first line of the article reads “An Egyptian man has been jailed for three years with hard labour for sexual harassment of a woman in the street.” The man, it is revealed later in the article, also had to pay over 5,000 Egyptian pounds to the woman who made the charges against him. Women’s rights activists in Egypt are happy about this incident because they feel that this is the first time the law has really severely dealt with the issue. Statistics released this year show that it’s a huge issue for women and that even 98% of foreign women and 83% of Egyptian women claimed to have experienced sexual harassment.
So, I have mixed feelings about this article. I’m very glad that the law is responding to the concerns of its people. I think that the numbers presented in the article about how many men admit to groping women and how many women claim to have experienced such harassment are awful.
That said- three years is a ridiculously long time. We’ve talked in class recently about our prisons filling up and holding people for too long; if all the people who admitted to sexually harassing women went to prison for three years, I imagine that Egypt would begin to have the same problems. It’s a difficult issue, to be sure, and I definitely support the law punishing people who invade others’ personal space in such a way. But I think that this won’t be something that always happens, and there needs to be a more clearly defined consequence for everyone so that this doesn’t end up being a one-time scapegoat episode.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7682951.stm
2 comments:
I know it is horrible to have some sexually harassed in order to finally get some justice but i am glad that Egypt is finally dealing with women's rights. I agree that there needs to be more defined consequences as well hopefully it will not happen any more.
It is crazy that in order for things to change, someone had to be sexually harassed. Im glad that harassment and abuse of women is being looked into, because a lot of times these kind of problems are looked over. But, I do believe three years is quite long for this man's offense.
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