Egyptian general admits 'virginity checks' conducted on prot

[Shroom Man 777]

Cairo (CNN) -- A senior Egyptian general admits that "virginity checks" were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.

The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.

At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests."

But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn't later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

This demonstration occurred nearly a month after Egypt's longtime President Hosni Mubarak stepped down amid a wave of popular and mostly peaceful unrest aimed at his ouster and the institution of democratic reforms.

Afterward, Egypt's military -- which had largely stayed on the sidelines of the revolution -- officially took control of the nation's political apparatus as well, until an agreed-upon constitution and elections.

Mubarak denies ordering shootings

The March 9 protest occurred in Tahrir Square, which became famous over 18 historic and sometimes bloody days and nights of protests that led to Mubarak's resignation.

But unlike in those previous demonstrations, the Egyptian military targeted the protesters. Soldiers dragged dozens of demonstrators from the square and through the gates of the landmark Egyptian Museum.

Salwa Hosseini, a 20-year-old hairdresser and one of the women named in the Amnesty report, described to CNN how uniformed soldiers tied her up on the museum's grounds, forced her to the ground and slapped her, then shocked her with a stun gun while calling her a prostitute.

"They wanted to teach us a lesson," Hosseini said soon after the Amnesty report came out. "They wanted to make us feel that we do not have dignity."

The treatment got worse, Hosseini said, when she and the 16 other female prisoners were taken to a military detention center in Heikstep.

There, she said, she and several of other female detainees were subjected to a "virginity test."

"We did not agree for a male doctor to perform the test," she said. But Hosseini said her captors forced her to comply by threatening her with more stun-gun shocks.

"I was going through a nervous breakdown at that moment," she recalled. "There was no one standing during the test, except for a woman and the male doctor. But several soldiers were standing behind us watching the backside of the bed. I think they had them standing there as witnesses."

The senior Egyptian general said the 149 people detained after the March 9 protest were subsequently tried in military courts, and most have been sentenced to a year in prison.

Authorities later revoked those sentences "when we discovered that some of the detainees had university degrees, so we decided to give them a second chance," he said.

The senior general reaffirmed that the military council was determined to make Egypt's democratic transition a success.

"The date for handover to a civil government can't come soon enough for the ruling military council," he said. "The army can't wait to return to its barracks and do what it does best -- protect the nation's borders."

This is beyond disgusting.

[PeZook]

Yay for the nascent Egyptian democracy?

That was foreseeable when the military took power. The military mindset is so vastly different from a civilian one that when the two clash, the shock is tremendous. I think those checks seemed like a very good idea to somebody in the chain of command.

At the time.

[K. A. Pital]

Good old crazy military. "There'll be accusations - let's probe them before they accuse us". Now they get accused of probing. The stupidity is just mind-boggling.

[Tritio]

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said...

Oooh yes. Not like your daughter or mine! I wonder who are their mothers then. Probably some woman. Most of them are.

[Sidewinder]

I wonder how on Earth- in the age of CNN, Twitter, Youtube, and more blogs than you can shake a stick at- the Egyptian brass thought they could get away with something like this.

[PeZook]

Good old crazy military. "There'll be accusations - let's probe them before they accuse us". Now they get accused of probing. The stupidity is just mind-boggling.

Militaries are used to treating people as subordinates: officers are so used to giving orders and having them obeyed that I can imagine when they start administering a country, this mindset will inevitably seep into their practices. Check out how much effort it takes to convince people to vaccinate their children, when soldiers are just told "Vaccinations tomorrow at 1800 ; Be there on time" and presto they will just line up to get their shots.

Especially when many Arab militaries also tend to treat their enlisted soldiers really badly. This is bound to compound the problem.

Then there come the inept attempts to spin this as something positive: it's hard to do that when it's possible the guy doing the PR doesn't understand what people are complaining about. This is really pretty classic and not at all new.

I wonder how on Earth- in the age of CNN, Twitter, Youtube, and more blogs than you can shake a stick at- the Egyptian brass thought they could get away with something like this.

That's the thing, though: they probably thought they should do it precisely to avoid accusations of rape etc which would spread over the net. Hence two doctors and a bunch of soldiers as witnesses.

As I wrote before, it probably seemed foolproof to the brass who just couldn't conceive how people could possibly complain.

[eyl]

That's the thing, though: they probably thought they should do it precisely to avoid accusations of rape etc which would spread over the net. Hence two doctors and a bunch of soldiers as witnesses.

As I wrote before, it probably seemed foolproof to the brass who just couldn't conceive how people could possibly complain.

Except that a bit of thought would have shown this was pointless (well, maybe not, given the society) - after all, whether or not a woman is a virgin does not disprove sexual assault (or rape, in the latter case) occured.

[Simon_Jester]

That's the thing, though: they probably thought they should do it precisely to avoid accusations of rape etc which would spread over the net. Hence two doctors and a bunch of soldiers as witnesses.

As I wrote before, it probably seemed foolproof to the brass who just couldn't conceive how people could possibly complain.

Except that a bit of thought would have shown this was pointless (well, maybe not, given the society) - after all, whether or not a woman is a virgin does not disprove sexual assault (or rape, in the latter case) occured.

"Maybe not, given the society-" that's the ticket. The officer who came up with this idea in the first place honestly believes that the 'virtue' of the women his troops detained was the really important matter at stake- prove that they were non-virgins and thus 'fallen women' and any rape charges they might make afterwards would be undermined.

This isn't really all that different from the mindset that existed in the West only a few decades ago.

Good old crazy military. "There'll be accusations - let's probe them before they accuse us". Now they get accused of probing. The stupidity is just mind-boggling.

Militaries are used to treating people as subordinates: officers are so used to giving orders and having them obeyed that I can imagine when they start administering a country, this mindset will inevitably seep into their practices. Check out how much effort it takes to convince people to vaccinate their children, when soldiers are just told "Vaccinations tomorrow at 1800 ; Be there on time" and presto they will just line up to get their shots.

This is just such a wonderfully concise way to describe the problem that I felt compelled to comment on it. I like it.

[wautd]

the Egyptian brass thought they could get away with something like this.

They got away with this kind of shit for decades. Old habits die hard.

[Serafina]

That's the thing, though: they probably thought they should do it precisely to avoid accusations of rape etc which would spread over the net. Hence two doctors and a bunch of soldiers as witnesses.

As I wrote before, it probably seemed foolproof to the brass who just couldn't conceive how people could possibly complain.

Except that a bit of thought would have shown this was pointless (well, maybe not, given the society) - after all, whether or not a woman is a virgin does not disprove sexual assault (or rape, in the latter case) occured.

The thing is that sexual harassment of women is not seen as something sexual by such people. As Simon_Jester said, it wasn't that different just a few decades ago in the West.

And no, i don't think this is based on a military mindset. It's based on a misogynistic, patriarchal mindset. According to that mindset, a womans sexuality consists solely of her reproductive function - her vagina and all related to that. Fondling her breasts or exposing her body literary do not count as sex under that mindset. They might be seen as indecent, but only because they are suggestive towards "actual" sex.

You can actually observe that quite often: Sexuality was centered around reproduction - a penis penetrating a vagina. That doesn't mean that other acts didn't happen - it means that they were not seen as sex. Ever wondered why male homosexuality was condemned as immoral/unnatural while female homosexuality was mostly ignored? It's because of this - female homosexuality generally does not involve penile penetration, while male homosexuality generally does. The former was just playing around, the second was a perversion of the sex act.

The reason for this is really quite simple: There was a direct distinction between "sex" and other sexual activities - the former involved the risk of babies, the latter did not. It's a pretty recent development that this risk has been almost eliminated if one chooses to do so. Before that happened, the distinction between "sex" and "sexual activities" was quite severe - one was potentially life-changing, the other was not.

So a man raping another woman risks destroying her life - the reason why people insisted on virgin women was mostly to prevent them from marrying another man after she had sex with another one. Since men can't get pregnant, no such checks were required for them - and a rapist was often forced to marry his victim for this reason (because no other man wants her).
But a man just fondling a womans breast (or something similar) is doing something that, by itself, was not perceived as harming the woman. The reason why "sexual activities" were often prohibited outside marriage is because "sex" is the next obvious step, not because the action itself is indecent. Women were often prohibited from appearing sexual for exactly the same reason.



According to that view, nothing sexual happened to those women. Sufficient precaution was taken that no penetration occurred (fondling the outside doesn't count apparently), so no sexual harm was done to these women.
Of course this is utter bullshit, but that's most likely the reasoning behind those acts.

[Broomstick]

That's the thing, though: they probably thought they should do it precisely to avoid accusations of rape etc which would spread over the net. Hence two doctors and a bunch of soldiers as witnesses.

As I wrote before, it probably seemed foolproof to the brass who just couldn't conceive how people could possibly complain.

Except that a bit of thought would have shown this was pointless (well, maybe not, given the society) - after all, whether or not a woman is a virgin does not disprove sexual assault (or rape, in the latter case) occured.

You are talking about a nation where upwards of 90% of the women have been subjected to "female circumcision", and there's a reason the most extreme form of that is called "pharonic circumcision".

Under those circumstances a "virgin" is a woman who has had her outer genitalia cut away and been sewn up, her crotch resembling that of a barbie doll, leaving only a very small opening for urine and menstrual blood. Until a larger opening is cut in her crotch she is physically unable to have penis-in-vagina sex with a man.

So yes, in that particular situation proof of virginity actually IS proof of no sex. Well, at least not vaginal sex. There is still oral and anal.

[fgalkin]

Ah, "democracy" in a country where the female genital mutilation rate is over 95%. I am shocked, SHOCKED, that something like this would happen.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[eyl]

I'm aware of the misgony in the region (which is why I qualified my statement). I somehow got the impression (which may be mistaken) from the OP that they were doing this partly for foreign consumption, in which case this ould be counterproductive, though even if that's th case it depends on what level the decision was made (a junior officer would be far more likely to not take cultural differences into account).

Besides that, even under their value system, this could have actually opened them up to accusations of rape if any occured (though maybe I'm being overly cynical regarding the likelyhood of rape actually occuring). If they hadn't done the tests, if a woman accused thm of rape, they could always claim the rape happened beforehand (or that it wa earlier consensual sex) - harder to do that when you yourself have certified the woman was a virgin when she came into your custody.

[Simon_Jester]

There's two major possibilities.

One is that this was just blatant sadism by a relatively junior officer (or a senior officer ordering it done in a single case), which the rest of the Egyptian military is trying to close ranks on and cover up in a hamhanded way.

The other is that we're looking at a very strange combination of 'Western' and local Egyptian values. On the one hand, the army is legitimately worried about the prospect that they will be accused of raping female demonstrators; on the other hand, they respond to this in a way that is motivated by placing effectively zero value on women when something that affects men is at stake.

[Imperial Overlord]

Ah, "democracy" in a country where the female genital mutilation rate is over 95%. I am shocked, SHOCKED, that something like this would happen.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Except it happened under the authoritarian dictatorship with those genital mutilation rates. A wonderful argument against the democracy. Abuses happen under the dictatorship and after decades of Mubarak's rule female genital mutilation rates are still heinously high, but hey let's not let those details stand in the way of ranting against guys who overthrew that regime and haven't even taken power yet.


Really this seems to be simple sex based terrorism which you see in any number of autocratic states, including ones in the Middle East. Threaten and humiliate female dissidents and perhaps escalate to actual sexual violence if that doesn't work. From what I've heard about what the Iranians and Syrians do, I expected worse.