Egyptian 'Virginity Tests'
The candid observation by an Egyptian general in explaining why "virginity tests" were conducted on women taken into custody for the civil affront of gathering in a public square for the express purpose of protesting against human rights violations, among other complaints in the Egyptian version of the 'Arab Spring' phenomenon reveals much about the Arab, and specifically Egyptian mindset about women."The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine. We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place. These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and drugs" CNN interview.They're obviously - those 'girls' - neither intellectually aware and mature, nor morally defensible. That they consorted within the context of a very public display of civil dissent with their male counterparts, proudly conscious of themselves as both intelligent and mature, tweaked the fascist misogyny of a male accustomed through tradition and heritage to view women as subservient, unwholesome and inferior.
The logic behind the convoluted and utterly morally-indefensible argument of the interviewed general escapes rationality. "Proving" through the process of a human-rights assault designed as a 'virginity test' that a woman is not a virgin, appears to give a green light for subsequent violent sexual abuse and rape because these women, or 'girls', have lost their right to respect in a Muslim society.
That these women were arrested, manhandled, forced against their will to submit to a male investigation of their innermost intimaacy was utterly justifiable on the basis of their having sinned against a male-dominated society which knows where women belong and it is not in the public eye. That they were forced to undergo a 'virginity test' was a gross violation of their right to respect and dignity, constituting a violent assault, akin to rape.
The 'virginity tests' that were imposed upon Egyptian women protesters, the electric shocks and strip searches were likely considered by this general - expressing the general view of his peers - to be routinely-applied techniques to impress upon women their untenable social status in a Muslim society. That they were also photographed by male soldiers during the application of these protocols adds further insult to their assault.
"They wanted to teach us a lesson. They wanted to make us feel that we do not have dignity", explained a 20-year old hairdresser,one of those named in an Amnesty report as she described to CNN the uniformed soldiers' assault on her, shocking her with a stun gun and claiming her to be a prostitute.
Labels: Conflict, Egypt, Political Realities, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, June 02, 2011
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