"I realized all the male rappers must have a track in which
they talk about girls and their clothes, blaming girls for everything
happening around us," said 19-year-old Mayam Mahmoud, an Egyptian
rapper. "That wasn't right. So I rapped about girls and the problems
they face."
Mahmoud, who rose to fame after competing on Arabs Got Talent, is using her music to hit back at Egypt's troubles with sexual harassment.
"You catcall and harass, thinking this is right," Mahmoud
raps in one of her songs. "Even if these are just words, this is not how
you treat [women], you're throwing stones."
She's part of a wider group
of young people and activists who have been using art to speak out
against the country's endemic problems with sexual harassment.
ust on Sunday night, Egypt's Tahrir Square saw a horrifying sexual assault,
where a woman was seized by a crowd celebrating the inauguration of
former military general Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi as president. The brutal
moment was caught in a short, two-minute video, where the university
student was undressed and assaulted by men in the crowd.
Egypt's government has criminalized sexual harassment recently, and seven people have now been arrested for the attack. But some rights groups estimated nine attacks in total that night.
According to blogger Fatima Said,
the new law runs the risk of being mostly a hollow gesture, since the
government usually allows these attacks to go unpunished. She also
argues that as long as the country's current government — which came to
power through a military coup that toppled now-jailed president Mohamed
Morsi last June — is still in place, the hopes for concrete action on
this problem are slim:
"The state simply does not care about women's rights. It is
happy to exploit them for photo opportunities and use them as tokens to
advance their own political agendas, but as long as the malfeasant
authorities continue to operate through a corrupt framework, no law will
bring about any difference, and as long as society continues to blame
and shame the victim instead of the perpetrator, nothing will change.
For now, the anti-sexual harassment law is nothing more than ink on
paper."
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