A video showing a mass sexual assault on a nearly naked woman in the midst of inaugural celebrations for Egypt’s new president is testing his pledge to curb an epidemic of such attacks, with captured scenes of a police officer with a gun in his hand struggling against a crowd of men to extricate the victim.
At first a black shirt covered just her shoulders, her backside purple and black with bruises. Moments later, she is seen stripped completely, as her limp and reddened body is carried into a waiting vehicle.
Captured in a blurry two-minute video taken in Tahrir Square on Sunday and circulated via YouTube on Monday, the attack is forcing the new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to confront a phenomenon many here had blamed on the collapse of the police force during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011: the recurring mass sexual assaults that have taken place amid the crowds that have gathered in Tahrir Square ever since.
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At times, the prevalence of sexual violence in the crowds was hard even for the official state television network to hide. Female screams interrupted the broadcast of a nationalistic poet reciting from a stage Sunday night, and a man next to him urged, “Play a song to distract them!”
At first a black shirt covered just her shoulders, her backside purple and black with bruises. Moments later, she is seen stripped completely, as her limp and reddened body is carried into a waiting vehicle.
Captured in a blurry two-minute video taken in Tahrir Square on Sunday and circulated via YouTube on Monday, the attack is forcing the new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to confront a phenomenon many here had blamed on the collapse of the police force during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011: the recurring mass sexual assaults that have taken place amid the crowds that have gathered in Tahrir Square ever since.
...
At times, the prevalence of sexual violence in the crowds was hard even for the official state television network to hide. Female screams interrupted the broadcast of a nationalistic poet reciting from a stage Sunday night, and a man next to him urged, “Play a song to distract them!”
