Arab Women in Revolution: Reports from the Ground
Part: 22
Logan Attack Doesn't Brand the Entire Middle East
By Corinna Barnard
WeNews editor
Thursday, February 17, 2011
A ghastly sex assault in Cairo should not boil down to the idea that the "Middle East remains dangerous for women," writes WeNews editor Corinna Barnard. Women everywhere face sex-assault danger and reporters run constant risk.
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(WOMENSENEWS)--Women's eNews would like to express strong concern for Lara Logan, the CBS News chief foreign correspondent who “sustained sexual attack" in the middle of the Cairo, Egypt, demonstrations on Feb. 11. Logan was working on a program for “60 Minutes" when she was surrounded by a mob, separated from her colleagues and assaulted.
As of now there are few other details on the nature of her attackers or the attack. CBS has said a group of women and about 20 soldiers moved in to protect her.
Despite the upsetting news of this attack, Howard Kurtz's conclusion about the incident in Tuesday's Daily Beast seems way off base. The assault "underscores that the Middle East remains a dangerous place for women," Kurtz wrote.
That seems like a big, hasty jump from the specific to the general.
The Middle East is a large region and many places, according to one of our female correspondents, are much more comfortable for women than others and--let"s face it--than many parts of the United States.
"It's different by country--safer more so in Beirut, Amman or Damascus than Cairo," our correspondent Iman Azzi wrote me today.
Azzi lives in Beirut, Lebanon, and was in Cairo this week to report a story for Women's eNews.
"Cairo may be safe but it is not easy. Cairo is legendary for harassment and I know Egyptian women are also victims of it constantly--mostly verbal harassment but often groping on the streets and by passersby. The attention on the streets is exhausting but I've never really felt in danger. The main problem is the lack of reaction from the authorities who seem to allow it. And the upper class, which travels by car and ignores it," she said.
Azzi said she thought the bigger dangers for women in the region come from the laws that don't protect them or aren't enforced or the possibility of violence by family members or those they know.
Dangers Elsewhere, Too
Sexual assaults also occur in mob settings in the United States, including New York City in broad daylight in one of our "safest" parks.
Street harassment of women is well known in Cairo, including a few notorious mob attacks that drew women into the streets to protest. Women's eNews has covered the difficulties of victims finding any justice in police departments under Hosni Mubarak's regime. We hope post-revolutionary activists will take this issue up for urgent reform attention.
Several foreign journalists were attacked during the Cairo demonstrations, reminding us of the extreme hazards of journalism.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, where Logan serves as a board member, says 852 journalists have been killed in the line of duty since 1992.
The group's steadily updated tally of killings record the most recent as that of Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, a male local journalist in Cairo killed on Feb. 4. His wife told Al-Jazeera that her husband had stepped onto his office balcony to take video of a confrontation between security forces and demonstrators on the street when security forces spotted him. She said he was killed by a sniper.
The committee finds that 93 percent of the journalists killed in the line of hazardous duty are male. So it's important to note that field reporting is dangerous for men.
Amid what The Committee to Protect Journalists called unprecedented attacks on journalists during the Egyptian demonstrations in early February, some female demonstrators remarked upon an unusual sense of freedom from harassment in the protests.
Azzi also mentioned this to me in her e-mail, although as the days passed the street harassment levels, she said, seemed to rise again.
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Part: 10
In the New Tunisia, Women's Rights Are in Play
By Barbara Crossette
WeNews senior news analyst
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