Quran Interactive Recitations - Click below

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

[MahdiUniteMuslims] Meeting Tackles Harassment of Arab Women

 

Meeting Tackles Harassment of Arab Women
 
First-Ever Regional Conference Reviews Verbal, Physical Abuse across Arab Nations
 
CAIRO, Dec. 15, 2009
 
In this July 23, 2008 file photo Egyptian boys watch passing girls at the Nile bank in Cairo, Egypt.
(AP)  The sexual harassment of women in the streets, schools and work places of the Arab World is driving them to cover up and confine themselves to their homes, said activists at the first-ever regional conference addressing the once taboo topic.

Activists from 17 countries across the region met in Cairo for a two-day conference ending Monday and concluded that harassment was unchecked across the region because laws don't punish it, women don't report it and the authorities ignore it.

The harassment, including groping and verbal abuse, appears to be designed to drive women out of public spaces and seems to happen regardless of what they are wearing, they said.

Amal Madbouli, who wears the conservative face veil or niqab, told The Associated Press that despite her dress, she is harassed and described how a man came after her in the streets of her neighborhood.

"He hissed at me and kept asking me if I wanted to go with him to a quieter area, and to give him my phone number," said Madbouli, a mother of two. "This is a national security issue. I am a mother, and I want to be reassured when my daughters go out on the streets."

Statistics on harassment in the region have until recently been nonexistent, but a series of studies presented at the conference hinted at the widespread nature of the problem.

As many as 90 percent of Yemeni women say they have been harassed, while in Egypt, out of a sample of 1,000, 83 percent reported being verbally or physically abused.

A study in Lebanon reported that more than 30 percent of women said they had been harassed there.

"We are facing a phenomena that is limiting women's right to move ... and is threatening women's participation in all walks of life," said Nehad Abul Komsan, an Egyptian activist who organized the event with funding from the U.N. and the Swedish development agency.

Open discussion of the harassment issue first emerged in Egypt three years ago, after blogs gave broad publicity to amateur videos showing men assaulting women in downtown Cairo during a major Muslim holiday.

The public outcry sparked an unprecedented public acknowledgment of the problem and drove the Egyptian government to consider two draft bills addressing sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment, including verbal and physical assault, has been specifically criminalized in only half a dozen Arab countries. Most of the 22 Arab states only outlaw overtly violent acts like rape, according to a study by Abul Komsan.

Participants at the conference said men are threatened by an increasingly active female labor force, with conservatives laying the blame for harassment on women's dress and behavior.

In Syria, men from traditional homes go shopping in the market place instead of female family members to spare them harassment, said Sherifa Zuhur, a Lebanese-American academic at the conference.

Abul Komsan described how one of the victims of harassment she interviewed told her she had taken on the full-face veil to stave off the hassle.

"She told me 'I have put on the niqab. By God, what more can I do so they leave me alone,"' she said, quoting the woman. Some even said they were reconsidering going to work or school because of the constant harassment in the streets and on public transpiration.

But even in Yemen, where nearly all women are covered from head to toe, activist Amal Basha said 90 percent of women in a published study she conducted reported harassment, specifically pinching.

"The religious leaders are always blaming the women, making them live in a constant state of fear because out there, someone is following them," she said.

If a harassment case is reported in Yemen, Basha added, traditional leaders interfere to cover it up, remove the evidence or terrorize the victim.

In Saudi Arabia, another country where women cover themselves completely and are nearly totally segregated from men in public life, women report harassment as well, according to Saudi activist Majid al-Eissa.

His organization, the National Family Safety Program, has been helping draft a law criminalizing violence against women in the conservative kingdom, where flirting can often cross the line into outright assault. Discussion of the law begins Tuesday.

"It will take time especially in this part of the world to absorb the gender mixture and the role each gender can play in society," he said. "We are coping with changes (of modern life), except in our minds."
 

Comment1:
 
In the west there is no protection for anyone from a so called 'free speech'. Which is the most common harassment. Where as in the Muslim world you get punished for even verbally harassing someone. If you touch someone then you get a beating, either from the police or the woman's family, or both.
 
Visit the link below to see how this evil Arab world running rampant with uncontrollable harassment deals with verbal harassment, let alone a physical one.

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/crime/student-sentenced-to-one-month-in-jail-1.136582


Comment2:
 
Right away I suspected that this must have Western hands behind it! Sure enough, "funding from the U.N. and the Swedish development agency"!
 
These are lies and fabricated stories to build pretexts for legislating laws that protect indecently dressed and semi-nude women walking around freely in Muslim societies, antagonizing chaste Muslim men and women, and spreading indecency, lewdness and immorality.
 
Their claim that women wearing Niqab are harassed by Muslim men is a malicious lie to make us believe that the problem has nothing to do with abandoning hijaab, mixing and indecent behavior, but an inherent trait of Muslim men. Unless, of course, they are wearing a fake hijaab/Niqab that is revealing and behaving in a seductive and indecent manner. 
 
Sexual assault on Muslim women is rampant in India with tacit approval from the government; and harassment of Muslim women wearing hijaab is a daily occurrence in many American cities and European societies! Why don't they sponsor a conference to address these real, more pressing and bigger issues?
 
Aren't women also harassing and intimidating men, and infringing on their Deen, when they go out in public wearing revealing clothes and inviting make up and perfume? Sexual harassment in a Muslim society reflects only one of the consequences of curtailing the role of Islaam and adopting Western life styles.
 
Islaam is the solution to all ailments of humanity but they refuse to see this, blinded by their evil intentions.

Comment3:
 
Hijab is not wearing a scarf on the head when you're wearing skin tight clothes on the body. The conditions for the Islamicly permissible clothes are that they should be loose and not tight, they should not reveal the shape of the body, they should not be transparent/translucent, they should not be an adornment themselves, they should not be like the clothes of the oppossite gender, they should be loose, simple and cover the body. The scarf on the head is a very small part of the hijab, not the hijab itself.

__._,_.___
.

__,_._,___

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive