Cairo Woman Claims to Suffer 100 Acts of Street Harassment in 4 Hours
Woman documents experience with New York harassment video in mind.
— -- A video from Cairo attempts to show how street harassment is a global problem, highlighting the experience of a woman who says she endured 100 acts of street harassment in just four hours.
Marwa Saber said she created the video for Dot MSR, an Egyptian news website, after seeing another video depicting a woman facing street harassment as she walks in New York for 10 hours.
"I wanted to do the Egyptian version of "10 Hours walking in NYC as a woman" video to show how many instances of the street harassment Egyptian women face every day," Saber, a video journalist, told ABC News.
As Saber walks through different Cairo neighborhoods, including the downtown area, men and women in the video appear to say derogatory things to her as she walks by. Saber logged 80 moments of verbal harassment, including some from women.
She also faced three instances of physical harassment, along with "stalking, catcalling and gazing,” she said.
To cut down the raw footage, Saber said producers edited out moments of street harassment that were "too rude," including the encounter when men on motorcycles started to circle her.
Others seem to leer at her and the video draws attention at least twice to two men as they appear to intentionally brush by her or touch her hand.
Because the exact translations would make no sense in English, she said, the text was changed in the video to better convey the meaning in English.
In one case, when a man comments on the woman’s striped blazer, the Arabic text, “I die in love with Zebras” was translated to “if I were a hunter I’d hunt your stripes.”
As Saber intended, the video echoes the one created earlier this year by Hollaback!, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to ending street harassment, which chronicled a woman walking around New York City for 10 hours as she was subjected to numerous catcalls. Emily May, the co-founder and executive director for Hollaback!, said she was happy to see a similar video come out of Cairo.
“I was so happy that they did this in Cairo,” May said of the video, which has no connection to her group. “I’ve been to Cairo myself and been groped and harassed walking through the streets.”
May said she was glad that the framework for the original video was being used to explore how people experience harassment worldwide because it can take on many different forms in different cultures.
May singles out two incidents in the Cairo video when men appear to brush by the woman. While the moment can appear innocuous on video, or just part of walking in a crowded city, May says, it can seem threatening in certain cases when repeated.
“If over the course of four hours it’s happening [repeatedly], it changes your experience of it,” she said. “It’s a small way of saying, ‘You’re mine, I can touch you whenever I want.’”
Monica Ibrahim, communications manager at Harassmap, a Cairo-based organization that tries to combat street harassment, called sexual harassment “a persistent societal problem” for women in Egypt.
“I believe this video would help the public realize the dimensions of the problem of sexual harassment in the streets of Egypt,” Ibrahim wrote in an email. “Only when the problem acknowledged we can start testing the proper approaches to decrease it and eliminate it.”
According to a 2013 United Nations study of harassment in Egypt, 99.3 percent of the women and girls studied reported having faced one or more forms of harassment.
