This paper examines bystander interventions to combat sexual violence in Egypt’s public spaces as a form of anti-carceral politics that has emerged in response to police and military tactics of the post-neoliberal Egyptian security state. Such interventions also represent a mode through which activists seek to fashion a new secular morality centered on human rights, in distinction to religiously-inspired articulations of women’s bodily security tied to private rather than public space. HarassMap, an Egyptian anti-sexual harassment initiative founded in late 2010, has served as a pioneer of volunteer-based bystander interventions in the country, which expanded in 2012 at the height of revolutionary protest with the rise of new decentralized, anti-state and anti-NGO initiatives seeking to combat sexual harassment, assault and rape in Tahrir Square and beyond. The rise of bystander interventions in Egypt coincides with its adoption as the solution du jour to gender and sexuality-based violence within international development and humanitarianism. Scholars have expressed concerns over humanitarian-based development interventions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), linking them to increased governmentalization and the (re)orientalization of both male and female bodies. Scholarly critiques of Egyptian anti-sexual harassment work have positioned some activists, including HarassMap, as instruments of Western aid agencies and Egyptian security state institutions. However, transnationally linked bystander interventions work in opposition to the increasing militarization of political power in Egypt, where the lives and deaths of incarcerated male bodies are at stake. These interventions contrast also with the political and juridical solutions to gender violence sought by civil society actors, who assign ultimate power over gendered human rights to the state. Bystander interventions constitute a move away from carceral politics to a politics of community security that rests on an embodied sense of individual responsibility linked to secular understandings of bodily rights and integrity. Here, the focus shifts from the gendered duality of the female victim who requires justice and the male harasser who must be brought to justice within a politico-legal structure that deploys violence against both. Through the figure of the bystander, class, racial and gendered differences in Egypt are, perhaps problematically, smoothed over as each body is ascribed equal capacity, burden and authority to fashion just public spaces. Bystander bodies become new terrain on and through which local and global forces struggle over the meanings of rights and responsibility in creating public security in Egypt.