DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Abrar Zenkawi was crossing the beach in Kuwait City when she saw a man waving and smiling in her rearview mirror.
Elsewhere, it might have been a benevolent highway flirtation. But in Kuwait, it’s a haunting routine that often becomes dangerous. The man pulls up next to her, comes closer and finally drives into her. Zenkawi’s car, with her toddlers, sister and girlfriend, overturned six times.
“It simply came to our notice then. “Men always drive too close to scare girls, chase them to their homes, follow them to work, just for fun,” said Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in hospital with a crushed spine. “They do not 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 speak out about the scourge of harassment and violence plaguing the Gulf nations’ streets, highways and shopping malls, in an echo of the global #MeToo movement.
An Instagram page has led to an outpouring of evidence from women who are fed up with being intimidated or attacked in a country where criminal law does not define sexual harassment, and little consequences for men who kill female family members for actions that they are considered immoral. A wide variety of news and talk shows have tackled the subject of harassment for the first time. And one journalist used a hidden camera to document how women are treated in the streets.
The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-Faraj, who braved her millions of followers on Snapchat in January after being chased by a man in a fast car. In such episodes, men often try to “bump” a woman’s car, but lead to very serious accidents, as in Zenkawi’s case.
“It’s scary, even if you feel so unsafe in your own skin,” al-Faraj told The Associated Press. “The responsibility is always on us. … Our music had to be too loud or our windows down. ”
Shayma Shamo, a 27-year-old doctor, tried to seize the momentum of al-Faraj’s viral video and create an Instagram page called ‘Lan Asket’, Arabic, for ‘I will not be silent’.
Shamo’s anger has been building for weeks. In December, a female employee of the Kuwaiti parliament was stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother, apparently because he did not want her to work as a security guard. This was the third case – described as ‘honor killings’ – that made headlines in so many months. The National Assembly, despite a record number of female candidates during the recent election, had no male sympathy.
“The silence was deafening,” Shamo said. “I thought, OK, this can happen to me, and anyone can get away with it.”
Kuwait, unlike other oil-rich Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, has a legislature with real power and a degree of tolerance for political disagreement. But restrictions to slow down the spread of the coronavirus prevented Shamo from protesting and forced her to take her grievances online, as women in the more oppressive region did recently.
The Lan Asket report put sexual harassment, long shrouded in shame, in the spotlight.
From there, the conversation shifted to traditional media. A well-known female journalist at the al-Qabas newspaper went out at night with a hidden camera and caught motorcyclists recklessly trying to attract attention, men shouting sexual insults on the street and strangers pulling the hair of female passers-by. evidence for millions in Kuwait of the harassment described by women.
“It seems rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions,” said Najeeba Hayat, who helped organize the Lan Asket campaign, which also trains bus drivers to report harassment, and organized an awareness-raising campaign. create and create an app that allows women to report abuse anonymously to the police. “Every girl kept it in her chest for so long.”
When the movement got steam, lawmakers scrambled to respond. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to stalwart liberals, last month introduced amendments to the penal code that would define sexual harassment and punishment, including one that calls for a $ 10,000 fine and one year in prison.
“The Kuwaiti penal code does not cover harassment; there are only a few laws that cover immorality, which are so vague that women cannot report to the local police,” said Abdulaziz al-Saqabi, a Conservative man, drafted amendments.
But women rights activists, whose input the legislators did not ask for, are skeptical that the proposals will bring about significant changes, especially with the country in the midst of a financial crisis and with parliament now suspended due to a political deviation.
The frustration is known to activist Nour al-Mukhled. She and other women have been struggling for years to repeal a law that classifies the murder of adulterous women by their fathers, brothers or husbands as a crime and sets the maximum sentence at three years in prison. Such indulgence remains widespread across the Gulf, although the United Arab Emirates has criminalized ‘honor killings’. last fall.
Kuwait also has statues with which kidnappers can evade punishment by marrying their victims and enabling men to ‘discipline’ their female relatives with assault.
“In Kuwait, no legal change can take place without cultural change, and it is still culturally acceptable,” al-Mukhled said. Only in August did parliament pass a law that opened shelters for victims of domestic abuse.
But progress is taking place outside official circles, activists say. In recent weeks, a growing number of female collectives have sprung up in homes and on Zoom – a mirror according to the use of the “diwanyia”, men’s clubs that often work men to the best. Women have also turned to Clubhouse, the buzzing app that allows people in auditoriums to gather to hold discussions about sexual assault and harassment.
The horizon for equality may be far away, but fighters believe their ambitions are modest in the short term.
“At the moment, attempted murder is considered ‘flirting’,” said Hayat, one of the organizers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We want to be treated just like humans, not as strangers and not as prey.”