DUBAI, UAE – Abrar Zenkawi was crossing the beach in Kuwait City when he saw a man waving and smiling in the rearview mirror.
Elsewhere, it may have been a benign road flirtation. But in Kuwait, it’s a disturbing routine that often becomes dangerous. The man approached her, approached her, and went into her. Zenkawi’s car, which was carrying his little nieces, sister and friend, turned around six times.
“It simply came to our notice then. Men always drive too close to scare girls, chase them home, follow them to work, just for fun, ”said Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in hospital with a broken spine. . “They don’t think about the consequences.”
But that may change as women increasingly challenge Kuwait’s deeply patriarchal society. In recent weeks, a growing number of women have broken taboos to talk about the plague of harassment and violence plaguing the streets, roads and shopping malls of the Gulf nation, in an echo of the global #MeToo movement.
An Instagram page has sparked the influence of testimonies from women fed up with being intimidated or attacked in a country where the penal code does not define sexual harassment and sets few repercussions for men who kill relatives for actions they consider immoral. A wide variety of news and social gatherings have addressed the issue of harassment for the first time. And a journalist used a hidden camera to document how women on the street are treated.
The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-Faraj, who in January posted Snapchat to millions of followers after being chased by a man in a speeding car. In these episodes, men often try to “collide” with a woman’s car, but many serious accidents occur, as in the case of Zenkawi.
“It’s terrifying, all the time you feel so insecure in your own skin,” al-Faraj told The Associated Press. “We always have the responsibility. … We must have had our music too loud or the windows low. ”
Shayma Shamo, a 27-year-old doctor, tried to take advantage of the momentum of Al-Faraj’s viral video by creating an Instagram page called “Lan Asket”, in Arabic for “I won’t shut up.”
Shamo’s anger had been rising for weeks. In December, a Kuwaiti Parliament employee was stabbed by her 17-year-old brother, who apparently did not want him to work as a security guard. It was the third such case – described as an “honor killing” – that hit headlines in so many months. The all-male National Assembly, despite a record number of female candidates in the last election, offered no condolences.
“The silence was deafening,” Shamo said. “I thought, okay, it could happen to me and everyone could get away with it.”
Kuwait, unlike other oil-rich Persian Gulf sheiks, has a legislature with genuine power and some tolerance for political dissent. But restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus prevented Shamo from organizing a protest and forced her to file her complaints online, as have women in the region’s most repressive countries. recently.
Lan Asket’s account drew attention to sexual harassment, long surrounded by shame.
From there, the conversation moved to the traditional media. A well-known female journalist from the state-linked al-Qabas newspaper came out at night with a hidden camera and caught motorcycle riders recklessly trying to get their attention, men shouting sexual insults in the street and strangers stroking the hair of the passing women. test millions in Kuwait of the harassment described by women.
“It sounds rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions,” said Najeeba Hayat, who helped organize the Lan Asket campaign, which is also training bus drivers to report harassment, organizing an advertising campaign to raise awareness and create an app that allows women to anonymously report abuse to the police. “All the girls have kept this on their chest for so long.”
As the movement gained strength, lawmakers struggled to respond. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to strong liberals, last month tabled amendments to the penal code that would define and punish sexual harassment, including one calling for a $ 10,000 fine and a one-year prison sentence.
“Kuwait’s penal code does not cover harassment, there are only a few laws covering immorality that are so vague that women cannot go and report them to the local police,” said Abdulaziz al-Saqabi, a conservative who was among whom amendments drafted.
But women’s rights activists, whose contributions were not solicited by lawmakers, are skeptical that the proposals will lead to significant change, especially with the nation in the midst of a financial crisis. and with Parliament now suspended due to a political confrontation.
Frustration is familiar to activist Nour al-Mukhled. For years, she and other women have struggled to repeal a law that classifies the murder of adulterous women by their parents, siblings, or husbands as a felony and sets a maximum sentence of three years in prison. This clemency remains common throughout the Gulf, although the UAE criminalized “honor killings.” Last fall.
Kuwait also has statues that allow kidnappers to evade punishment by marrying their victims and allowing men to “discipline” their women women with assaults.
“In Kuwait, there can be no legal changes without cultural changes, and that is still culturally acceptable,” al-Mukhled said. Only in August did Parliament pass a law opening shelters for victims of domestic abuse.
But progress is taking place outside official circles, activists say. In recent weeks, a growing number of women’s groups have emerged, in homes and in Zoom, a mirror to the custom of the “diwanyia,” gentlemen’s clubs that often turn men into superior jobs. The women have also turned to Clubhouse, the animated app that allows them to meet in audio chat rooms, to hold discussions about sexual assault and harassment.
The horizon for equality may be far away, but advocates say its ambitions are modest in the short term.
“Right now, the assassination attempt is considered ‘flirting,'” said Hayat, one of the organizers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We just want to be treated as human beings, not as aliens and not as prey. “.