Mona Mazbouh sat on the floor of a single police cell in Cairo, with no light, bed, and with only cockroaches and a rat as company. The water that ran from the tap was dirty, and without a toilet, she had to use a hole in the wall as her makeshift bathroom. She tried to rest, but every time she’d lay down, a police officer would kick the door and scream in her face. For days, she went without sleep. The only time they’d let Mona leave the cell was when officers would bring in women they’d arrested for sex work. An officer would open Mona’s door, drag her out, and told her to watch. They would then line the women up outside Mona’s cell, tie their arms and legs together, and sexually assault them. “They told me, ‘We wish we could do this to you’” Mona recalls.
The reason Mona – a 24 year-old from Lebanon, who was visiting Egypt – believes she wasn’t subjected to assault is because, at the time, she was at the centre of a country-wide media storm. Mona hadn’t committed a crime: she was behind bars because she had posted a video on Facebook talking about sexual harassment.
Mona arrived in Egypt in May on a vacation to see friends. She had visited the country before, but this time she was subjected to harassment. She was verbally abused by two men in Cairo’s Zamalek neighbourhood, and numerous men made sexually inappropriate comments to her in public. Later that day a man grabbed her breast as she walked down a pathway.
Tired and frustrated by her experience, Mona got back to her hotel and took out her phone. As a way to release her pent up anger, she started recording an explicit tirade about the harassment she experienced that day, criticising the country in the process. She posted the video on her private Facebook page, and relieved from the stress of the day, went to bed.
When Mona woke up the day after, she decided to delete her video, and go on with her travels. But she was unaware her video had been ripped from her private page by a contact, without her consent, and published on local Egyptian Facebook pages. By the following day, her rant against harassment had gone full-blown viral in Egypt. WhatsApp messages from her concerned friends began to flood her phone.
“They asked me, ‘What are you doing in Egypt? It’s a big problem.’ I then opened a link they sent me, and it was my video playing.” Under her video, comments read: “Be careful because we know where your hotel is, and we will splash your face with acid,” and “If I see you in the street, I will stab you in the stomach.”
It’s not uncommon for women to turn to Twitter and Facebook to speak out against harassment, particularly in the #MeToo era. But Mona faced a different problem. Her arrest came at a time when Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi approved new legislation aimed at targeting people guilty of spreading “false news” about Egypt.
The legislation, signed over the summer, gives the government the power to shut down websites critical of the government, under the guise of combating misinformation. The laws are strict: just visiting a website considered a “threat” to Egypt could land a you in jail. To make matters worse, the new media law regards individuals with over 5,000 followers on social media as media entities in their own right. Ordinary social network users are considered to be on the same playing field as large media companies, and they are legally obliged to abide by the strict censorship rules.
When word of the Lebanese tourist who spoke ill of Egypt had reached the authorities, Mona became a target. She posted an apology video to try and calm the situation. That didn’t work: in June she was arrested at the police station, where she had originally travelled to in an effort to clear her name. Later on, in July, an Egyptian court sentenced Mona to eight years in prison, convicted of “deliberately broadcasting false rumours which aim to undermine society and attack religions.”
Mona served nearly 3 months of her sentence, but after a successful appeal in September, her lawyers managed to wangle her release. She’s now back in Beirut, Lebanon, where she lives. But she still thinks back to the inhumane conditions she lived in, together with dozens of women, inside the prison. At one point, two weeks before she was released, Mona attempted suicide.
Mona’s experience isn’t isolated. A woman she met while in prison was Amal Fathy, an Egyptian human rights defender. Fathy was arrested in May for posting about her experiences of sexual harassment. When Fathy’s video was reported on by local media, she was subjected to intense online harassment, and later arrested. She was found guilty of “spreading false news” and is currently in jail on a two-year sentence.
“Amal had heard I was in there [prison] for the same reason as her,” Mona said, recounting the first time she met her in prison. “She told me to come over and hugged and kissed me, and she gave me chocolate. And we cried. We knew we weren’t alone.”
Human rights organisations have criticised the Egyptian government's crackdown on freedom of expression, in what they say has been a shift from arresting opponents and critics in the street, to silencing people on social media. Often, Egyptian authorities organise “troll armies” deploying abusive language, threats, and harassment online to bully critics, especially women.
Beyond this, the criticism has been targeted at social media platforms for failing to speak out against the arrests, or implementing their guidelines to tackle harassment. “In Egypt, we see that when there is a repressive regime – and this can easily traverse the digital world,” Hussein Baoumi, an Egypt researcher for Amnesty International, says.
Mona’s ordeal has made her reluctant to fully express herself on social media again. She reported the death threats she received on Facebook, but so far the social network has taken no action against those threatening her. She reported all of the copies of her video too, but only a handful were removed. “If someone saw me in person after watching that video, they’d have attacked me,” she says.
Still, she hopes women will keep speaking out – even if it is considered “false” news by government standards. “I want to tell women: don’t be quiet, don’t stop talking. Because every time you’re silent, they will make things worse for us. Women deserve the right to be loud.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
