DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Abrar Zenkawi was driving to the beach in Kuwait City when she saw a man waving and smiling in her rearview mirror.
Elsewhere, this may have been a benign highway flirtation. But in Kuwait it is a haunting routine that often turns dangerous. The man pulled up next to her, got closer, and eventually bumped into her. Zenkawi’s car, with her toddler nieces, sister and friend, turned six times.
‘It’s considered normal here. Men always drive way too close to scare girls, chase them home, follow them to work, just for fun, ”says Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in hospital with a shattered spine. “They don’t 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 ravaging the Gulf nation’s streets, highways and shopping malls, echoing the global #MeToo movement.
An Instagram page has sparked a torrent of testimonials from women tired of being harassed or attacked in a country where the criminal code does not define sexual harassment and has little repercussions for men who murder female relatives for acts they consider consider immoral. A wide variety of news and talk shows first addressed the topic of harassment. And a journalist used a hidden camera to record how women are treated on the street.
The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-Faraj, who hit Snapchat in January to her millions of followers after being chased by a man in a speeding car. In such episodes, men often try to ‘bump’ a woman’s car, but the result is many serious accidents, as in the case of Zenkawi.
“It’s scary all the time when you feel so unsafe in your own skin,” al-Faraj told The Associated Press. “The responsibility always lies with us. … We must have had our music too loud or our windows opened. ”
Shayma Shamo, a 27-year-old doctor, tried to grab the momentum of al-Faraj’s viral video by creating an Instagram page called “Lan Asket”, Arabic for “I will not shut up”.
Shamo’s anger had been growing for weeks. In December, a female employee of the Kuwaiti parliament was stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother, allegedly for not wanting her to work as a security guard. It was the third case – described as ‘honor killings’ – that made headlines in as many months. The National Assembly, which was all male despite a record number of female candidates in the recent elections, did not offer any of the usual condolences.
“The silence was deafening,” Shamo said. “I thought, okay, that could happen to me, and anyone can get away with it.”
Kuwait, unlike other oil-rich sheiks in the Persian Gulf, has a legislature with real power and some tolerance for political dissent. But restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus kept Shamo from staging a protest and forced her to take her grievances online, as women in the more repressive countries in the region have done. recently.
Lan Asket’s report spotlighted sexual harassment long shrouded in shame.
From there, the conversation moved to traditional media. A well-known female journalist at the state-linked Al-Qabas newspaper went out at night with a hidden camera and captured motorcyclists recklessly trying to get her attention, men shouting sexual defamation in the street and strangers shouting female passers-by pulled the hair. evidence to millions in Kuwait of the harassment described by women.
“It seems rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions before,” said Najeeba Hayat, who helped organize the Lan Asket campaign, which also trains bus drivers to report harassment, runs an ad campaign to raise awareness, and to create an app that enables women to report abuse anonymously to the police. “Every girl has kept this in her chest for so long.”
As the movement gained momentum, lawmakers rushed to respond. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to stalwart liberals, last month filed changes to the criminal code that would define and punish sexual harassment, including one calling for a $ 10,000 fine and a one-year jail term.
“The Kuwaiti Penal Code does not cover harassment, there are only a few laws covering immorality that are so vague that women cannot go to the local police and file a report,” said Abdulaziz al-Saqabi, a conservative among those. was those drafted amendments.
But women’s rights activists, whose input the lawmakers have not solicited, are skeptical that the proposals will lead to significant changes, especially now that the nation is in the midst of a financial crisis. and with Parliament now suspended due to political deadlock.
The frustration is known to activist Nour al-Mukhled. For years, she and other women have fought to repeal a law that classifies the killing of adulterous women by their fathers, brothers, or husbands as a crime and sets the maximum sentence at three years in prison. Such leniency remains common in the Gulf, although the United Arab Emirates makes ‘honor killings’ a criminal offense. last fall.
Kuwait also has statues that allow kidnappers to escape punishment by marrying their victims and allow men to ‘discipline’ their female relatives with violence.
“In Kuwait, there can be no legal change without cultural change, and this is still culturally acceptable,” said al-Mukhled. Only in August did parliament pass a law opening shelters for victims of domestic violence.
But progress is being made outside of official circles, activists say. In recent weeks, a growing number of female collectives have sprung up, at home and at Zoom – a mirror of the custom of the ‘diwanyia’, men’s clubs that often lead men to top jobs. Women have also turned to Clubhouse, the buzzing app that allows people to congregate in audio chat rooms to have discussions about sexual assault and harassment.
The horizon for equality may be far off, but campaigners say their short-term ambitions are modest.
“At the moment, attempted murder is considered ‘flirting’,” said Hayat, one of the organizers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We just want to be treated like humans, not aliens or prey.”