Published by lprashad at 9:00 am under HarassMap

Hania Shuleimy was walking home one night after teaching a late class. She says “someone just grabbed me … he grabbed my breasts and I fought my way out and I swore madly and screamed at him and he ran away. But no one did anything. … I cried and cried and cried all the way home.”

Shuleimy is a professor of gender studies at the American University in Cairo. She says harassment is now endemic in Cairo.

“I also find that many veiled women get harassed and many little girls get harassed and people who are not particularly hot get harassed. I think it has more to do with denigrating femininity in whatever guise,” she says.

Stories like Professor Shuleimy’s, documented in Lourdes Garcia-Navarro’s NPR story yesterday, are all too common in Egypt. But, as Ms. Garcia-Navarro unearthed in her reporting, there is great hope that the January 25 revolution will instill a “sense of respect” for Egyptian women – a respect that some felt was exhibited in Tahrir Square during the protests. Over the 18 day uprising, men and women congregated together in the square with less harassment and more equality than usual, and some felt that this was a sign of new liberation for Egyptian women. However, these steps forward have been overshadowed by the February 11th attack on CBS’ Lara Logan where she was beaten and raped in Tahrir Square. This unusually brutal attack on the CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent has brought the world’s attention to the systemic problem of sexual harassment in Egypt.

In an effort to draw attention to the problem of sexual harassment in Egypt, NiJeL built HarassMap, a website where Egyptian women can report incidents of sexual harassment and visualize where harassment occurs across Egypt.

We are partnering with a fantastic group of Egyptians dedicated to eliminating sexual harassment from Egyptian streets. HarassMap uses the Ushahidi platform to gather crowdsourced information on sexual harassment from multiple channels, including SMS, Twitter, email and the web. HarassMap also provides a simple interactive map and timeline to show where and when sexual harassment occurs.

While sexual harassment occurs as individual incidents it is a degrading act against the entire community.  We think that it’s important for the extent of the problem to be publicly mapped, visualized, and analyzed so women know they are not alone and can fight together for their rights.

HarassMap started as an idea from UCSD neuroscience graduate student, Justin Kiggins, whose wife was subjected to daily harassment while in Egypt as a Fulbright scholar. Our first action was to submit HarassMap as a proposal to the NetSquared USAID Development 2.0 Challenge , which made it into the Top 15 Projects. While HarassMap did not receive funding from this effort, we gained momentum and confidence to move forward with the project.

Since then, our partners in Egypt, led by Rebecca Chiao, have been conducting community engagement around HarassMap to ensure that women who experience sexual harassment and intimidation have access to resources and are building a dedicated volunteer network in Cairo.

We hope HarassMap will continue to be an important tool in stopping sexual harassment in Egypt and that one day soon HarassMap will only house historical data to teach about sexual harassment in Egypt as a past problem that has been overcome.

SOURCE: http://nijel.org/blog/2011/02/harassmap-org-ending-the-social-acceptability-of-sexual-harassment/