DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Abrar Zenkawi was sailing towards the beach in Kuwait City when he saw a man waving and smiling in his rear view mirror.
Elsewhere, this may have been a benign flirtation on the highway. But in Kuwait, it is an obsessive routine that is often dangerous. The man stopped beside her, stepped closer and finally entered her. Zenkawi’s car, carrying his nieces, sister and friend, overturned six times.
“It is considered normal here. Men always drive too close to scare girls, chase them to their homes, accompany them to work, just for fun, ”said Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in the hospital with a shattered spine. “They don’t think about the consequences.”
But that may be changing as women are increasingly challenging Kuwait’s deeply patriarchal society. In recent weeks, an increasing number of women have broken taboos to talk about the scourge of harassment and violence that plagues the streets, highways and shopping malls of the Gulf nation, in an echo of the global #MeToo movement.
An Instagram page has generated a flood of testimonials from women tired of being bullied or attacked in a country where the penal code does not define sexual harassment and offers little repercussions for men who kill relatives for acts they consider immoral. A wide variety of news and talk shows addressed the subject of harassment for the first time. And a journalist used a hidden camera to document how women are treated on the streets.
The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-Faraj, who vented on Snapchat in January to her millions of followers after being chased by a man in a speeding car. In these episodes, men often try to “hit” a woman’s car, but there are many serious accidents, as in the case of Zenkawi.
“It’s scary, all the time you feel so insecure in your own skin,” said al-Faraj to The Associated Press. “The responsibility is always ours. … We must have put our music too loud or our windows open. ”
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 will not be silent”.
Shamo’s anger had been building for weeks. In December, a Kuwaiti Parliament official was stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother, allegedly because he did not want her to work as a security guard. It was the third case – described as “honor killings” – to make headlines in a few months. The National Assembly, made up of men only, despite the record number of female candidates in the last elections, offered none of the usual condolences.
“The silence was deafening,” said Shamo. “I thought, OK, it could happen to me, and anyone 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 slow the spread of the coronavirus prevented Shamo from protesting and forced her to take her complaints online, as women in the region’s most repressive countries have done. recently.
Lan Asket’s report has put sexual harassment, long shrouded in shame, into the spotlight.
From then on, the conversation shifted to traditional media. A well-known journalist from the state newspaper al-Qabas went out at night with a hidden camera and captured motorcyclists who were recklessly trying to get his attention, men shouting sexual slanders in the street and strangers pulling the hair of passersby – offering evidence to millions in Kuwait of the harassment that women were describing.
“It seems rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions before,” 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 creating an app that allows women to report abuse anonymously to the police. “Each girl kept this on her chest for so long.”
As the movement gained momentum, lawmakers struggled to react. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to die-hard liberals, last month introduced amendments to the penal code that would define and punish sexual harassment, including one that required 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 to the local police,” said Abdulaziz al-Saqabi, a conservative who was among those who proposed of changes.
But women’s rights activists, whose views legislators did not request, are skeptical that the proposals will result in significant changes, especially with the country in the midst of a financial crisis. and with Parliament now suspended because of a political stalemate.
The frustration is familiar to activist Nour al-Mukhled. For years, she and other women struggled to abolish a law that classifies the killing of adulterous women by their parents, brothers or husbands as a misdemeanor and establishes a maximum sentence of three years in prison. This leniency remains common throughout the Gulf, although the United Arab Emirates has criminalized “honor killings” last autumn.
Kuwait also has statues that allow kidnappers to escape punishment by marrying their victims and enable men to “discipline” their relatives with aggression.
“In Kuwait, there can be no legal change without cultural change, and that is still culturally acceptable,” said al-Mukhled. Only in August did Parliament pass a law that opened shelters for victims of domestic violence.
But progress is taking place outside official circles, activists say. In the past few weeks, an increasing number of women’s collectives have emerged, in homes and at Zoom – a mirror of the custom of the “diwanyia”, gentlemen’s clubs that often take men to leadership positions. Women also turned to Clubhouse, the app that allows people to meet in audio chat rooms to discuss violence and sexual harassment.
The horizon for equality may be distant, but activists say their ambitions are modest in the short term.
“At the moment, assassination attempt is considered ‘flirtation’,” said Hayat, one of the organizers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We just want to be treated like human beings, not like aliens and not like prey.”