One of the nice things about blogging about the fear, paranoia, control and shame at the heart of the Sex 2.0 world is that you are presented with examples of it practically on a daily basis.
It’s like having a commissioning editor that hands you ideas for your articles. So, this entry into our semi-regular feature “Rogue’s Gallery” is Egyptian doctor Ahmed Adel and the Egyptian military.
Ahmed Adel – Innocent … apparently
He was in the news this week because a 25-year-old marketing manager called Samira Ibrahim brought legal action against him. She was a protestor who, during a protest in Tahrir Square in March 2011, was arrested.
The protest happened just weeks after the fall of the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
While female protestors were held by the army, they were given electric shocks, beaten, forced to strip in front of male soldiers and forced to submit to a virginity test by a male doctor. The reason given for the tests? To check if they were prostitutes and, even more bizarrely to “protect the army from allegations of rape”. Here, let me sexually assault you in order to protect me from allegations of rape.
The army lied and said that the virginity tests never happened but Amnesty International later got a confession, anonymously, from a senior army general that in fact they did indeed take place.
The legal case caused a national outcry in Egypt with all kinds of vehement and frothy insanity bubbling up from the Egyptian masses including death threats against Samira Ibrahim for daring to bring the case and taking on the ruling authorities. Odd you might think from a country that only just rose up to throw the ruling elite out of power in the first place.
She was also vilified for breaking the taboo of talking about sexual assault in public. Apparently you are supposed to keep quiet about that kind of thing in Egypt.
An Egyptian general actually defended the practice with the justification that these were not decent girls because “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters”. The general said, “The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine”.
Right, ok, so basically these must be sluts and whores is basically what he was saying. Nothing more Sex 2.0 than that.
Predictably the legal case failed. Why? The court said that “contradictory testimony” between the witnesses and the doctor who was on trial was the problem. What, you mean the story of the guy who is being sued does not match the story of the people suing him? That was the reason that the case failed?
Well, it was an unsurprising verdict bearing in mind the trial was held in a military court and not a civilian court. The military finding the military guilty of anything? Not a chance.
“This is rape, and I fainted when I heard the verdict in court,” Samira said. “God knows the truth, and it will always be a black spot in Egypt’s history.”.
