Egypt’s Sexual Violence Epidemic

A string of attacks on women “highlight the failure of government and all political parties,” according to a Human Rights Watch statement.

Remember when CBS correspondent Lara Logan was raped by a mob of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, back during the first days of the Arab Spring? Well, in this latest round of unrest it’s happening again, and again, and again. A young Dutch journalist was raped in Tahrir Square last Friday (as reported by Egypt 25 News and more or less confirmed by the Netherlands Embassy in Cairo). Meanwhile, the United Nations has collected reports of 25 cases of sexual assault in Tahrir Square, while the Egyptian group Op Anti-Sexual Harassment says it received 46 such reports on June 30 alone, and at least a dozen more since. Things have gotten so bad that some men are apparently forming protective human shields around groups of women protesters. That’s a nice gesture, but not exactly a solution to what is obviously a deep-seated problem.

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