Egypt – Abuse of Women – Low Reportage – Shelter Needs
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: February 19, 2006
EGYPT: Abused women reluctant to come forward
CAIRO, 16 Feb 2006 (IRIN) – Despite the opening of the first
safe-house for women in Cairo, few are choosing to leave their abusive marriages
due to the social stigma and financial insecurity they would face.
Oum
Mohammed was married when she was 16. “From the day I married him, he hit me
over matters big and small,” she says of her husband.
“He told me that
all women should be beaten. I didn’t protest because I was afraid he’d throw me
and my children into the street,” she adds. “I’d seen my father hit my mother,
and in every house in the alley a man hits a woman.”
Oum Mohammed’s story
is just one of 700 case studies that the Association for the Development and
Enhancement of Women (ADEW), a local NGO, has collected over the past several
years.
Hearing stories like these convinced ADEW that there was an
urgent need for a shelter for women who are victims of violence.
According to the NGO, domestic abuse is common in Egypt. A 2001 survey
conducted in low-income neighbourhoods found that 96 percent of women had been
beaten at least once by their husbands.
Such violence is often condoned
by society, or even by the victims, experts say.
A majority of the women
surveyed in a government study, for example, said a husband had the right to
beat his wife if she talked to him disrespectfully, talked to another man, spent
too much money or refused her husband sex.
If a woman goes to the police
station to report domestic abuse, the police adopt “the cultural perspective
that the man has the right to do it”, says ADEW officer Bahira El-Gohary.
Men convicted of domestic violence in Egypt face sentences ranging from
monetary fines to three years in prison. According to Nihad al-Qumsan, head of
the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights, however, “most of the time, judges give
low penalties”.
Obtaining a divorce, meanwhile, even in marriages where
there is physical abuse, can be a long and costly procedure.
The
fundamental problem is that most women have nowhere to go in the event that they
leave their husbands. They face the economic difficulty of supporting themselves
and their children, as well as the social stigma of living without a man.
The families and neighbours of such women often encourage them to return
to their husbands.
The ADEW shelter was set up to offer them an
alternative.
“This has never been done before,” says ADEW Director Iman
Bibars.
According to women’s rights groups, there are no other public or
private shelters for women escaping abusive relationships in Egypt, and only a
few across the entire Middle East.
But bringing about the
ground-breaking project hasn’t been easy.
“We’ve had very many problems
with the opening of the shelter,” admits Azza Salah, head of the
project.
While it has taken time to raise funds and find trained medical
staff, ADEW officials say the greatest obstacle has been the women’s own fear of
leaving their homes.
“We’re facing taboo issues: women sleeping outside
the home and staying away from their families,” says El-Gohary. “Most of the
women express their fears about how society would view them and whether it would
accept them back.”
Salah says that many women think “if they leave the
house, their husbands will take another woman”.
According to al-Qumsan,
women also have reservations about the shelter’s capacity to provide for them
once they have left their husbands. For a shelter to work, she says, it has to
provide “a complete solution,” which means “helping a woman to become more
independent, find a job, feed herself and her kids and find her own
house”.
This is what ADEW’s “House of Eve” hopes to do. Located at an
undisclosed location in the capital, the shelter offers counselling, medical
check-ups, job training, literacy classes and legal advice.
If they
choose to, about 20 women can live at the shelter with their children for up to
three months. Upon leaving, they are given small loans as part of a micro-credit
programme.
For now, women from some of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods
are coming to the shelter to attend classes and talk to counsellors. But none of
them have taken the step of moving into the House of Eve fulltime.
Any
woman “is most welcome to come,” says El-Gohary.
“But…we can’t force her
to come,” she adds. “It’s not an easy decision to take.”
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