What the Egyptian Revolution can offer #MeToo

When my Facebook feed flooded with #MeToo in English and in Arabic, I noticed that the posts by my Egyptian friends were longer, angrier, but also more questioning than the rest. Friends in Europe and America posted lots of statements: “Sadly, unsurprisingly, #metoo.” Right away, Egyptians wanted to talk about what this hashtag could do; who its audience was; the value of seeking male allies in the fight; the complicated dynamics of a movement pressuring women to “tell” when they might not want to, might not be able to (…) Five years ago I stood on a street corner in Tahrir and watched, feeling useless, as dozens of men sexually attacked a woman—or perhaps multiple women. It was dark and it was difficult to make out what was going on right in front of me. The crowd was rotating around a central point that I could not see. Reports of mob attacks of this kind against female protesters had spread in recent weeks. In these mobs of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, women were encircled, stripped, beaten, groped, and raped. I was there with a group called Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Assault (OpAntiSH), which for the past few weeks had been intervening in mob attacks to rescue women. I was carrying a backpack containing an abaya (a full-length robe), a pair of medium-sized underwear, flip-flops, painkillers, gauze, and disinfectant—all the stuff we’d learned women might need after surviving these kinds of assaults. Although I could no longer see them, I knew that a team of OpAntiSH volunteers was physically fighting its way through the mob to reach the woman being attacked. I was part of a “safety unit” that was supposed to remain nearby but not get caught in the crowd so that we could get to the survivor afterwards and coordinate getting her home, or to one of the safe houses OpAntiSH had arranged, or, if necessary, to the hospital.

Yasmin El-Rifae in What the Egyptian Revolution Can Offer #MeToo (Thenation)