Sexual violence against women has become endemic at Egyptian political protests, including mob attacks on women who are stripped and penetrated by men’s fingers. I explore two aspects of how this violence affects women’s rights activism. The first is how activists’ understanding of who commits these assaults affects the likelihood of the emergence of new women’s rights groups distinct from general pro-democracy activism. In interviews in Cairo in 2012 some women’s rights activists told me that fellow “revolutionaries” were responsible for at least some of the assaults, while others blame them on “thugs” or Mubarak supporters. The sensitivity of this issue was clear in a December 2012 TV interview with Ola Shahba, who addressed her assault by protesters sympathetic to President Mohammed Morsi by saying “I would not have imagined that I would experience sexual harassment at the hands of a group belonging to political Islam.” Threatened with additional violence at the anti-Morsi protest, Shahba said “I don’t want to die at the hands of people with whom I demonstrated once upon a time.” I argue that if more women come to believe that “co-revolutionaries” commit many assaults, they will create specifically feminist anti-assault groups separate from the current pro-democracy protest organizations, just as in the 1980s women in Egyptian leftist political parties despaired of the parties’ sexism and left to form feminist NGOs (Ali 2000). The second issue is how women’s rights groups respond to male anti-assault activism. Some men join mixed-gender groups such as Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH), created in November 2012 to stop assaults in progress during protests. Other men form “cordons” around protests to keep assaulters from reaching protesters. Some women’s rights activists discourage this as communicating that women need to be “protected” in public space, as demonstrated by OpAntiSH’s refusal to coordinate with a cordon-based group– Tahrir Bodyguard – in the large February 6, 2013 protest against assault. Do the men in anti-assault groups which do not use cordons understand assault, and women’s role in the public square, differently than groups like Tahrir Bodyguard which seek to “protect” women? My paper draws upon interviews I conducted in June 2012, interviews I will conduct there in June 2013, discussions of the issue on Egyptian TV talk shows, including interviews with men and women involved in anti-assault work and women who experienced assault, and the statements of anti-assault groups and other feminist NGOs.