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Social Media, Political Opportunity and the Anti-Sexual Harassment Campaign in Post-2011 Egypt
Abstract
This paper will explore the ways in which Egypt’s 2011 revolution has provided a fertile climate for women’s movements to gain widespread recognition, thus allowing them to instigate an unprecedented push for collective action. We will focus on HarassMap: Egypt’s first ever initiative working to combat the sexual harassment epidemic using mobile and online technology. A damning UN report conducted in 2013 claims that 99.3% of Egyptian women admit to have been sexually harassed, while 85% said that no bystanders stopped to intervene. Although this is nothing new, such sexualised violence has emerged again as a highly organised and systematic tactic for ‘punishing’ and humiliating Egyptian women who partake in political action including being groped, verbally abused, undressed or gang-raped. Launched only one year before the revolution, HarassMap offers Egypt’s first online platform where victims can anonymously report incidents of sexual harassment using email, a phone call or an SMS message. This data is then collated onto a virtual map presented on the HarassMap website, which flags ‘harassment hotspots’ around Egypt that are targeted directly through on-the-ground community activism. Using the political process theory as a basis, this work analyses HarassMap’s progress and evaluates its effectiveness. We will argue that two important developments in Egypt’s post-uprising context have been vital to HarassMap’s success: i.) the new opportunities for social dissent and political action made possible in the wake of the revolution, and ii.) the central role the internet and new media has claimed within the lives of Egyptians as tools of citizen awareness and engagement in post-2011 times. Together, these two factors have provided a ripe and opportunistic backdrop enabling HarassMap to raise the status of sexual harassment in Egypt, to rally participation, and more recently, to expand the medium of their message from a limited online platform to a nation-wide mass media campaign. Thus, although the women’s movement in Egypt has existed for decades, our discussion will provide evidence of how the ability to take advantage of timely political opportunities and to mobilize technical resources has allowed initiatives such as HarassMap to find a new impetus for collective action in post-2011 Egypt. Furthermore, the discussion on HarassMap will provide an important springboard to exploring the broader question of whether or not women’s initiatives that have proliferated post-2011 can be considered part of a collective feminist movement.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries