I’m sorry I harassed you

This article contains testimonies that some readers may find disturbing or upsetting.

Mixed in with the outpouring of testimonies and discussion about sexual violence this summer has been a particular brand of social media post: the apology — as in, men publicly saying “sorry” for sexually harassing or violating women. 

What is the function of an apology between people, and how has it been happening in cases of harassment or assault? What constitutes a meaningful apology? 

The stories women told about apologies they received, or didn’t, for incidents of sexual assault and harassment highlight the difference between remorse and apology. Remorse, the feeling of having made a mistake, is internal and subjective, and creates a feeling of guilt. It is a state people reach without being pushed towards it by others. An apology is the expression of remorse in words or actions toward others: it is a practical action based on remorse. Without remorse, apologies do not work. 

Marram* was not the only woman harassed and assaulted by a man in the human rights world, but, she says, “he was well-known in his field as someone nice and pleasant. So, whenever I’d say that he’s a harasser and unpleasant in his interactions, many people — both men and women — wouldn’t believe it, which was maddening.” 

He persistently demanded phone sex with Marram, even though she said “no” every time. He did not recognize her refusal, or her discomfort with his advances. She later heard of other accusations against him, including of rape, but everyone was silent. This silence was paralleled by men and women praising the harasser for his political and human rights work. For Marram, this created a state of denial or doubt about what had happened and prompted many questions like: “Is this person who helps people for a living really a harasser? Is there some sort of confusion? Who is wrong: me or the circles that shower him with respect?” All of this made her feel crazy, she said, until she met another woman who is a survivor of his sexual assault. “I only felt that I wasn’t crazy when I found another survivor of his sexual assault,” she says. Then she met a third and fourth survivor.

After Ahmed Bassam Zaki was accused of serial assault and rape, triggering a wider speech movement on sexual violence, Marram and several other women decided to collect testimonies against the harasser, and planned to take them to the public prosecution. When he learned of this, he decided to apologize and contacted a mutual friend to inform her of his apology. This retraumatized her, Marram says: After two tiring years of therapy and medication, the harasser simply wanted to apologize simply to gain sympathy and trust, so that if other survivors filed criminal complaints, he would be able to sabotage it. 

The well-known human rights figure posted an apology on social media, to all the girls and women he had sexually assaulted. He gave some justifications, most notably that it had been a phase in his life that had ended, and that he is now a lot more mature. The striking thing for Marram was not the apology itself, but the social support he received from men and women in their mutual circles. It was as if crimes are resolved with an apology driven by the criminal’s fear of scandal, she says. The support directed toward the harasser reached the point of blaming survivors for not accepting his apology, saying that it should be enough for her.

Marram adds that it is completely insulting that the agency is always in the hands of the harasser: he is the one who decides to harass and sexually assault, and he is the one who decides to apologize. And in both cases, the woman is the one who suffers psychological abuse and must recover.

Mariam’s*story differs from Marram in every detail except for the word “sorry.” When she spoke about her experience, which took place about four years ago, her voice trembled, and she fought to control it. “I was on summer vacation with the family and in the swimming pool, my brother-in-law put his hand inside my swimsuit. It wasn’t the first time he had assaulted my body, but it was the most difficult and brazen. I lost my balance and dove in the water for a few seconds. I couldn’t steady myself on my feet from the shock. Then I left and didn’t tell anyone anything. I shut up for the rest of the trip and when we went home, I exploded and confronted my parents, but another shock came when they didn’t do anything. After I insisted, they tried to somehow confront him, but he kept evading them. In the end, they remained passive.”

Sometime later, Mariam’s mother told her sister about the assault. “My sister couldn’t do anything but force him to apologize to preserve her dignity. He called me at work and said verbatim: ‘Sorry, don’t be upset if I’ve done anything that bothered you.’ There was no room for discussion and the matter was seemingly closed for them even though it’s not over for me to this day.” Legal action seemed out of the question. 

Since 2016, Mariam has not swum in a pool or gone to the sea. She can’t wear swimsuits because they bring back the incident vividly: she can feel his unwanted hand touch the bottom half of her body. In her view, the apology meant nothing because it was forced. He only apologized because his wife — her sister — asked him to, in order to maintain the family’s image. He did not express any kind of remorse or admission of wrongdoing, and he evaded discussing the actual act.

Mariam’s brother-in-law had played a supportive role toward her for nearly a decade, the entirety of his relationship with her sister. She says his harassment and assault made her feel that he wanted something in exchange for that support.

Members of her family have moved on, as if he’d done nothing at all. Following the apology phone call, he visited their home and Mariam’s mother warmly welcomed him. “I objected at the time,” Mariam says. “Then my mother accused me of lying, and said that the only thing I wanted was to destroy my sister’s life even though my mother herself had previously complained of his stares, that she felt he was undressing her with his eyes. But, unfortunately, she denied all of this.”

Mariam is still forced to deal with the person who assaulted her, and says her personal relationship with her sister has been destroyed. “She chose her husband,” she says.

The third woman I spoke with didn’t even want to use a pseudonym. She was distressed, and in tears, as she told her story. There is a  faculty member at her university who was hardworking, helpful and loved by everyone. She was delighted when she learned that he would supervise one of her classes. He offered to help her, and she went to his office several times. He invited her to a coffee outside of the university. She agreed and they went to a public place one morning to have coffee together. The next time she visited his office, he physically harassed her by placing his hand on her behind and pulling her toward him. She could only push him away and leave in haste.

The student remained silent for a long time, during which she would see him at university. She found it unbearable that he would act completely normal with her. Switching schools wasn’t really an option — she was a top student in her class and felt that it would negatively affect her future, plus her family would object. She couldn’t tell anyone about what had happened in his office. Eventually, she went to a psychologist who encouraged her to file a complaint with the university administration, but she didn't. Instead, she confided in a female university professor she trusted, seeking her advice. 

At first, the professor empathized with her and supported her. Then she talked with her male colleague and her attitude toward the student changed. She told her things like, “I found out that you went out with him and in that case, he’s not entirely at fault.” Then she told her that the accused professor wanted to speak with her, and she received a phone call from him in which he said: “I’m very sorry, I didn’t know you were that upset. But I made an offer in the beginning and you agreed. This is normal in any developed country, it’s just supply and demand. I apologize once again.”

The student says that his justification for harassment in his so-called apology, and the pain it caused her, was worse than the harassment itself. She did not discuss it with him during the phone call because at that moment, there was another voice inside her saying that he was right, that going out with him justified it, that it was an offer for sex, and she agreed. She went back to her therapist, who helped her finish her studies and reinforced the idea that getting asked out by a colleague, friend or anyone she knows is one thing and offering or demanding sex is something totally different.

“An apology could help in recovery, but it isn’t necessary,” psychiatrist Dr. Nabil al-Qot says. “Some people recover without any apology from their abuser. As some studies have shown, some apologies lead the survivor to relive the trauma.”

A real apology may be useful, he says, because it can provide a sense of validation and a feeling of safety, a signal that the world is not ruled by chaos. Dr. Qot explains what an apology requires in order to be helpful to a victim of sexual violence.

“First, the apology must include an admission of the truth of what happened, the harm that was caused and that it wasn’t all an illusion,” Dr. Qot says. “Second, the abuser must take full responsibility for the harm without giving any justifications such as the clothes she was wearing or the circumstances of assault, like being drunk. Third, the apology must validate the pain endured by the survivor. Fourth is reparations. And the idea of reparations isn’t limited to money, but it means that the abuser is fully prepared to do anything that satisfies the survivor. For example, paying money, doing a service she asks for, coming forward to receive legal punishment, or leaving the workplace, if the assault happened there. Reparations are very important for the survivor because it gives her a feeling that her pain and what she has been through is recognized and deserves payback. Lastly, the apology must include a promise to not repeat it and that the future is safe.”

A proper apology tells the survivor that what happened is an exception, not the rule. Recovering without an apology is based on strengthening the self, not on the idea that the world is safe. Dr. Qot adds: “The abuser’s apology, even if it is a proper one, does not necessarily eliminate the survivor’s need to continue the legal process against him. In fact, applying the law and the necessary institutional measures against the harasser can be an integral part of his apology and it achieves the reparations requirement.”

On harmful forms of apology, Dr. Qot says: “The justifying apology negatively affects the survivor because it justifies and legitimizes the abuse. One of the most rampant excuses is the woman’s clothes or actions. There’s also the reluctant apology that is neither clear nor decisive. They just say ‘sorry.’ There are apologies that center around the abuser, not the survivor, that are based on the idea of ‘I’m apologizing because I’m a man and I was raised well,’ not because of the pain and harm I caused or the fact that the survivor is a human being and it is her right to be respected. There’s also the forced apology, which is driven by wanting compromises from the survivor. Finally, there’s the denial apology in which the abuser distances himself from his crime or talks about it as if it is normal behavior.”

On the social support a harasser receives for his apology, Dr. Qot thinks that people have not understood the real scale of the crisis women are experiencing, and are unable to absorb their pain. “They are unable to understand that the streets, places of work, homes and even entertainment venues are not safe spaces for most women and that the result of this is extremely harmful for society.” When it comes to human rights organizations and other supposedly progressive spaces, he says, patriarchal frames of reference persist behind the political positions that they declare. “The issue requires a much bigger struggle until the frames of reference in these places are only those of human rights.”

Dr. Qot advises survivors of sexual assault not to confront the harasser’s supporters because that will only result in more pain. Instead, they must find their own support groups to continue their fight.

After her experience of harassment within the human rights community, Marram is firm on the insufficiency of apologies as they seem to be made. “The phrase ‘I’m sorry’ from an abuser will never have a positive effect on me. If anything, it could very well have a negative effect because for me, it’s nothing. I don’t need it; I need the harasser to be punished because harassment is a crime.”

Marram says that she could accept someone’s apology in the moment for saying or doing something she is uncomfortable with — provided the person does not do it again. But she cannot accept for someone to assault a woman’s body, then go on their way as if nothing ever happened until they feel that their crimes are going to be exposed. The apology, in this case, is made by the harasser only to save himself, and ends up hurting the victim all over again. 

*pseudonym