CAIRO: The parliamentary ombudsman issued a report chastising the British embassy’s failure to process a British woman’s report of rape in 2011. The embassy in Cairo did not provide the woman with the legal and medical support, forcing her to turn towards the Egyptian authorities. As a result, the British embassy issued an apology to the survivor and it is compensating her with GBP £1,000.
“[The actions] were so poor that they were maladministrative,” says the report. According to The Guardian, the embassy did not help the survivor arrange a medical examination, find a lawyer, or get the necessary treatment. For this reason, the survivor resorted to reporting the crime to the Egyptian authorities, “where she had a ‘panic attack’,” says The Guardian.
The British woman’s experience is rather characteristic to the difficulties women face when reporting sexual assault under the Egyptian legal framework. “Many women are reluctant to file a report,” said Dalia Abdel-Hameed to The Cairo Post, head of the gender program at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. ”Often times, the process of reporting [the assault] is as traumatizing as the sexual violence itself.”
Egyptian public hospitals and police stations do not have a protocol of how to deal with cases of sexual violence. “It is not stipulated [under the law] that women need to take contraception,” said Abdel-Hameed. “They are not even tested for AIDS or STDs.”
Furthermore, a “morality policy” reigns over the Egyptian legal framework, said Abdel-Hameed. Survivors of rape and sexual assault are subjected to “virginity tests” as part of the report´s proceedings. The main purpose of the virginity test is to ensure that the woman´s social respectability has not been compromised. “It is hard to proceed [with the report] without it,” said Abdel Hameed.
Another obstacle women face when reporting sexual assault is the law’s erroneous definitions of what constitutes rape and sexual assault. Under the Egyptian legal framework, “if it [rape] is not penile penetration, it is not considered rape,” said Abdel-Hameed. The law’s definitions of rape are very limited, she said. Consequently, rape with objects or the rape of men, is not considered as rape under the law.
Finally, women are discouraged to report crimes of rape and sexual assault due to the stigmatization of sexual violence by Egyptian society. A culture of victim blaming prevails, producing a police apparatus that interrogates survivors about their attire at the moment of the assault and blames them for going out, said Abdel-Hameed.
Whether an Egyptian or a foreigner, not a single person escapes the law’s maltreatment of sexual assault survivors. The laws regarding sexual violence have not changed significantly since Mubarak’s regime. After the revolution, laws were amended to make the penalties for sexual assault more rigorous, said Abdel-Hameed. However, the problem is that these laws are not being implemented.
In regards to the British Embassy, they have released a public statement that says the following: “We fully accept the Ombudsman’s findings; we have already implemented the short-term recommendations in the report and we will fully act on all those remaining.”
