In a recent survey, 83% of Egyptian women said they'd suffered some form of sexual harrassment. 62% of Egyptian men admitted harassing women, and 53% blamed the women for provoking them with their immodest dress - even though more than 70% of the women who'd been harrassed were wearing a headscarf at the time. Now some of the women are fighting back (via):
In a dojo, or martial arts training area, in a poor working class suburb of Cairo, women in karate uniforms and tracksuits are learning to fight off an assailant.
In this male-dominated society it is unusual to see these women in their headscarves sparring with men, but such is the concern here at the rise of sexual harassment cases that the number attending this class grows every month.
Shaza Saeed, 14, is one of the new recruits.
"I was on my way home from school and I was attacked - I didn't know what to do," she said.
"But now I have learnt how to defend myself so I am not afraid any more. I think every girl should go to self-defence classes like this."
At the back of the gym, the mothers, some in all-covering Islamic dress, look on with admiration.
In the past some of have even joined in. There are women of all ages taking part. They fight each other and sometimes they fight the men. [...]
[I]n a landmark case last year a judge handed down a three-year sentence to a man who had repeatedly groped a woman pedestrian as he drove alongside her in Cairo.
The victim, Noha Ostadh, initially held onto her assailant's vehicle and finally succeed in dragging him to a police station.
Since that case came to light the topic has been more openly discussed in the media.
The government belatedly has recognised they have a problem. There is new legislation passing through parliament that would define sexual harassment as a crime and make it easier for women to report it.
But the women in the karate class say it will require a more concerted effort from Egyptian society, and a backlash from men themselves, if they are to win on the street the honour and respect they are afforded in the dojo.
Might this report help to explain why sexual harrassment has become such a problem?
These days the centre of Cairo is a dusty, polluted, overcrowded metropolis. But in the 1940s it was a city full of style and culture, the beating heart of an Arab renaissance.
Downtown the bars and nightclubs flourished along the sweeping boulevards attracting all sorts of adventurers from around the world.
Since then many of the bars and cabaret clubs have fallen into disrepair and disrepute, as the Egyptians grow more observant of conservative Islam....
Max Rodenbeck, journalist and author of Cairo, the City Victorious, says belly-dancing has faded out in the last 10 years.
"It has really suffered from the wave of conservatism that has passed over this place," Mr Rodenbeck says....
Another writer who looks back with fondness on the Cairo of old is the author of the best-selling novel The Yacoubian Building.
Dr Alaa al-Aswany blames the slow death of downtown Cairo on the encroachment of conservative Islam.
"From the beginning of the 1980s it became very hard, sometimes impossible, for the owner to pass on the liquor licence to a son or a new owner," he said.
"I think it is all part of the government's attempts to counteract the fanatics - but they are doing in the wrong way. The government's trying to make the point they are as religious as the fanatics. It is silly really."
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