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Harassmap Lets Egyptian Women Report Sexual Harassment via Text, Twitter

by Amar Toor on October 25, 2010 at 04:10 PM

egyptian men and women
For many women, strolling down the streets of Cairo is no walk in the park. Whether it's in the form of catcalls, leers or gropes, sexual harassment has become increasingly common in Egypt, where strict social norms and widespread public negligence have offered little recourse to female victims. A forthcoming site called Harassmap, however, may provide Egypt's women with a new voice -- and, perhaps, a renewed sense of empowerment.

Due to launch in the coming months, Harassmap will allow women to instantly report incidents of sexual harassment via text message or Twitter. Each report will then be pinpointed on a digital map of Cairo, in order to determine particularly dangerous areas of the city. Users who submit the reports will remain anonymous, and the collected data will be shared among activists, media and police.

Women who send text alerts to Harassmap will also receive safety suggestions, support, and instructions on filing police reports. Activist volunteer Engy Ghozlan, however, emphatically states that the site shouldn't be confused for a hotline, and that victims shouldn't consider it to be a substitute for calling the police. "The whole idea is to have user-generated information," Ghozlan tells the AP.

Harassmap certainly isn't the first site to take a crowd-sourced approach to emergency response. A similar network called Hollaback has already launched sites in several cities around the world, and offers the same kind of anonymous online platform. Harassmap's map of Cairo will run on a platform called Ushahidi, a revamped, open-source software that first garnered international attention during the violent aftermath of Kenya's 2008 elections.

Yet, in order to be as effective as either Hollaback or Ushahidi itself, Harassmap will likely have to overcome some pretty significant obstacles. Many cultural norms, for example, discourage women from talking about sexual harassment. Some even blame women for inviting lewd behavior with their dress or behavior. Observers, meanwhile, have noted that Harassmap may inadvertently exclude women who are illiterate, or less tech-savvy than their peers.

There is, however, one hurdle that Harassmap might be able to clear: politics. Many Egyptian lawmakers, including First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, have openly questioned whether sexual harassment is even a problem worthy of their attention. By geographically representing the pestilence in black-and-white clarity, Harassmap should at least be able to dispel the notion of sexual harassment being a myth, and hopefully spur the Egyptian government to take substantive action.

Tags: cairo, crowdsourcing, egypt, harassmap, maps, MiddleEast, OpenSource, police, sex, SexualHarassment, SocialNetworking, top, ushahidi

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