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The Role of Women’s Rights Organizations in Promoting Masculine Responsibility: The Anti-Sexual Harassment Campaign in Egypt
Abstract
Notions of responsibility are intimately tied, if not always explicitly, to conceptions of masculinities and femininities in both collective and individual practices. Projects for gender justice and women’s empowerment often imply masculine responsibility in formulating the problem and suggestions for reform but men, while deemed responsible, are often not directly targeted by women’s rights organizations in their awareness and conscious raising campaigns and projects to promote gender equality. The implications of not directly addressing the role of men and masculinities in projects for gender justice are a gap in knowledge that will affect the successful implementation of internationalized gender mainstreaming, particularly in the area of gender based violence. The example found below comes from over three years of research following a campaign to end one form of gender based violence, sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo. In late 2005, the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights (ECWR) was compelled to launch a multi-faceted, anti-harassment campaign in Cairo, Egypt after hearing a multitude of stories from women experiencing harassment on the streets. Their aim was to not only document the extent of sexual harassment through surveys and focus groups but to use this research to advocate for legal and policy changes as well as forming the basis for awareness raising events and influencing public opinion through events and the media. Based on the results from their surveys and focus groups, ECWR concluded that men's awareness of the problem and a change in their behavior must play a key role in the campaign's focus; convincing men of the responsibility of self, with a consequence of stigmatization that was formally being placed on the victims. Thus the framing of this campaign not only relied on an increased knowledge of the need for an acceptance of social obligation but simultaneously, and discretely, evoked the importance of community responsibility and each individual playing a role in combating this severe, social issue to a make Cairo’s streets safer. Based on over three years of field work, we found that ECWR has since attempted different strategies including workshops and awareness days that, through the employment of responsibility and challenging current notions of masculinity in Egypt, have shown the significant need for, and effective implementation of, gender mainstreaming on the local level. Founded on this local and communal level, promoting an internationalized gender mainstreaming discourse may be more effective than implementation coming from above.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries