Inherent guilt: Menna Abdel Aziz and the victims of Ahmed Bassam Zaki

On July 1, dozens of reports of rape, sexual abuse and harassment broke out online. They were all about one 21-year-old student named Ahmed Bassam Zaki. Many of the stories were collected and posted on a new Instagram account @assaultpolice, which organized them according to category: real-life assault, online harassment, violations that happened outside of Egypt, and so on. Schools and universities he attended had previously been warned of his behavior, with little consequence. 

Within a couple of days, mainstream media outlets were talking about the allegations, and most of the Egyptian internet knew the student’s name. Four days after the stories broke, the police arrested him; he is now charged with attempted rape and indecent assault. 

The story triggered a wider speech movement almost right away. Three weeks later, women, both famous and not, are still publicly sharing their experiences about harassment and assault at work and at school. Some men are, too. They are recounting specific incidents, naming abusers, expressing solidarity with victims/survivors, and demanding that institutions be held to account for dismissing complaints without investigating them. People are saying, frankly, what we have all known: that the very vast majority of girls and women face some kind of sexual violence or harassment in their lives. All of this has had the momentum of a gathering storm; there is a feeling that we are on the verge of disruption, a holding-of-breath, which is what it feels like when change becomes possible. 

Five women and one underage girl have filed reports with the prosecution against Zaki so far. Within one week of the initial reports, Cabinet approved a procedural amendment allowing prosecutors discretion to withhold a victim/plaintiff’s identity in certain cases of sexual violence from the main case files, keeping it in a separate file to be shared with defense lawyers and courts upon request. It’s a step toward protecting survivors from threats and abuse they face from the people they accuse as well as privacy violations by the media.

We’ve already been here a number of times this past year: when reading about Amr whatshisname, the soccer player accused of harassment, and the weeks-long debate about whether or not Mohamed Salah was wrong to defend him, or the music video by Tameem whatshisname, and the agonizing over the line between satire and smirkingly promoting the status quo. Each time, it very quickly felt like the whole world around us was paying attention. Each of those moments felt like an opportunity, and each time, just like that, it was gone. 

The sudden centering of rape and assault in mainstream media, and the stirring of enough public attention to amend criminal procedural codes within a week, is no small matter in a context in which public speech is more policed and restricted than ever before — in which we have been forced to retreat from any kind of mobilization around questions of bodily freedom or integrity. Civic and social organizing has become so beleaguered that people usually don’t even think of it as a possibility anymore. Which makes the explosion of posts, calls and petitions happening today all the more critical.

Those of us who have been around long enough blogged about harassment in the mid-2000s, when blogging was a space for political opening; went on TV in the late 2000s, when TV still had space for politics; organized marches and protests when there was still a political street. Back then there was a particular focus on street harassment. NGOs campaigned for better laws and protections from the state; some, like Al-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, worked with the belief that the state, with its history of complicity in torture and sexual abuse, itself needed reform before it could deal with sexual violence in a way that didn’t retraumatize vicitms. Filmmaker Noha El Ostaz became an icon for taking her harasser to trial. Advocates spent years, decades, talking about the need to protect victims’ identities in the way the government moved to do last week. 

Even the most ground-down gender rights activist will tell you that we have made gains in the last decades, but that we also remain in a crisis of violence and inequality. 

The earliest accusations against Zaki go back to when he was 14 years old. That he was so young when the pattern begins, combined with the multitude of testimonies against him and their graphic details, has led some to pathologize him, describing him as sick, as a monster. But rape is not done by monsters, it is done by human beings, and what’s different this time is how far and how quickly the general discourse has moved beyond discussing Zaki’s case as an individual problem. Sexual violence is a deeply personal violation enabled by social systems which maintain a belief that women’s bodies fundamentally belong to others. This is there in the ways in which state and society have used religion — from sexist inheritance laws to ideas tying up family honor with a sanctified sort of female chastity, and it’s also there in the ways in which we educate and entertain. It is the burden of survivors of this violence that we must face not only our own trauma, but that, if we speak of it, we must also face the tremors and the backlash of social structures as they defend themselves. 

A question many have been asking is: How did he get away with this for so long? When so many people were involved? When it had been flagged before, on an AUC messaging board, for example? 

I attended AUC, just one of the institutions where Zaki reportedly harassed and abused several people. From the outside, back then, the university’s students were seen to possess social freedoms in the bubbles of their privilege: their parents’ money and connections, the spaces they were able to live, study, party, work out, and hang out in. Inside the bubble, sexual policing of women was alive and well, with students regularly snitching on each other — to each others’ parents about their romantic relationships, to each others’ boyfriends about infidelities, to the gossip channels for run-of-the-mill slut shaming.  

I don’t know what it’s like to be a student at AUC today. But it seems to still be a culture in which women feel compelled to silence, their reputations held ransom. Threatening to tell a woman’s family, as Zaki did, that they are sexually active — whether or not this is the truth — in order to coerce her into sex is essentially punishing her for being female: For having a sexuality that you think should be controlled, and therefore feel entitled to abuse. His line of threats and blackmail calls up previous assertions by state and society that women who are sexually active can’t be trusted, and can’t be raped.

It’s an attack that was made against Menna Abdel Aziz by her rapist in an online video, after the 17-year-old TikTok personality spoke out and named her attackers.  She was arrested a few days later, and dealt with by prosecutors as both a victim of rape and battery, and as a defendant held on remand on charges of misusing social media, inciting debauchery, and violating family values. The prosecutor general transferred custody of Menna to the Ministry of Social Solidarity, and she is currently being held in a women’s shelter for victims of domestic violence. As gender rights researcher Lobna Darwish said in an interview, we’re seeing a precedent being set in the state using a space meant to shelter the abused as a place of coercion.

Yesterday, the press started quoting judicial sources saying that Menna’s forensic exams ordered by the public prosecutor showed no signs of sexual assault but did show evidence of physical assault. At least two articles carried sensationalist headlines about the “surprise finding.”  Medical exams do not prove whether or not a rape or assault was committed — just because there is no trace of a rape does not mean that it did not happen. They are one tool the prosecution can use in gathering evidence around an alleged rape or assault; the examiner is guided by specific questions from the prosecution to look for genital injuries or DNA, for example. It’s not yet clear what Menna’s  medical report means for this investigation, but it’s important to note that rape does not always cause genital injuries, and that, since her exam took place several days after the incident, if she did sustain genital injuries they might have healed.

Menna, reportedly an orphan and one of thousands of underprivileged kids on the make who have seized TikTok as their tool, was met with a lot of victim-blaming as well as some public sympathy and calls for her rapists’ arrest. Some called on the state to take custody of and rehabilitate her; blame was folded into some form of sympathy that saw being raped as inevitable when a young woman is too flashy, too open, too unfathered. The prosecutor’s own statement suggests she was somehow driven to this fate by harsh familial and financial circumstances. A few weeks after Menna’s transfer from jail to the women’s shelter, news items praised the public prosecutor for going beyond his job and rehabilitating her. The focus on forcibly fixing Menna rather than her rapists or attackers is another way of blaming her for the violence she was subjected to. Although her story stands apart because of the brutality she was subjected to before her arrest, it’s important to remember that she is one of nearly 10 women the government has locked up in just the past few weeks on morality charges related to how they dress, sing, and speak on the internet.

Control is at the heart of all of these stories. It is also why the public prosecutor’s July 3 statement announcing the investigation of Zaki does not describe the allegations against him as rape or assault, but as coercing women into “immoral acts.” Rape becomes not a crime against a person, but against the public. Over and over, statements by the prosecutor and the Justice Ministry open and close with the need to protect social values or family morals. Why is the priority the protection of these abstracted ideas, rather than individuals? Or is the point to remind us that, in the end, our bodies and our sexualities are not our own? 

Earlier this week, a group of women launched a campaign under the sarcastic hashtag “With permission from the Egyptian family,” advocating for the release of Menna and the other TikTok women. Some are calling the government hypocritical for claiming to do a good job of protecting women by prosecuting Zaki while also arresting Menna and the TikTok women, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that both moves stem from the same paternalistic approach. 

Celebrities didn’t speak out when Menna’s story and the video of her bruised face went viral. There was no cascade effect; women with platforms didn’t start saying #metoo, because they didn’t see themselves in her, at least not in a way they wanted to publicly be seen. I am not suggesting that we all need to come forward with our stories as survivors all the time, or even ever — we have a right to feel too tired and too unsafe to speak. But it’s important to question the social responses to these two stories here to try to find a way forward on this path that will inevitably get more complicated, and more risky, for women of all backgrounds who are moved by this moment. 

Zaki’s case shatters the myth that sexual violence in its most brutal forms is not done by “welad el nas,” that it is somehow specific to poor or uneducated segments of society, which are still imagined to be steeped in criminality. That sexual violence transforms into some milder kind of violence, something politer, the farther we go up the class ladder. The campaign against Zaki took off to great effect largely because it was run by — and directly concerned — upper-class young people. But there is a deep well of buried trauma, of people who want to speak out but can’t, because society has shown over and over again that more often than not it is the victims/survivors who lose their jobs, their relationships, whatever social standing they might have had or — like Menna — are taken into custody. 

The outpouring of testimonies and exposure that we are seeing today is driven, at least in part, by an understanding that so much rape would not happen if rape were not at once both expected and hushed-up. The “culture of silence” around rape and assault is not an isolated social force or set of beliefs; it is something we all participate in. It’s in how we talk about gender and sex (or don’t), it’s in what we prioritize, who we listen to. What can we do to help those who want to speak out, in the face of certain backlash? When the prospect of being disbelieved carries a serious threat of charges of defamation or fake news, of arrest? 

During the years of revolution, groups of women and men fought against mass rape and sexual assaults in Tahrir. The language we used was liberationist. We talked about freedom of the body, freedom of movement, freedom in the absolute. We fought with so-called progressive allies who had told us that this wasn’t the time for us to fight against rape, that it was a side issue in a larger political battle — a discourse I read again a few days ago in what amounts to a defense of a publisher accused of assault. Something feels timeless and repetitive in the defenses of sexual abuse which never admit to being defenses of sexual abuse. There is a reason that women’s liberation movements have always had common cause with anti-racism movements, with queer movements, and why they have been seen as so dangerous. Because we understand that for our bodies and sexualities to belong to us, so much else will have to unravel.