Despite the Arab revolt, women remain shackled to past

The camera was still rolling when men began jostling Sonia Dridi, a glamorous television journalist for France 24 news. She was filming near Cairo's Tahrir Square, the epicentre of a supposed democratic awakening in the Middle East. What happened to Dridi suggests the so-called Arab Spring has been an exercise in wishful thinking in the West.

Even in public, with a TV crew filming, the men could not restrain themselves. About two dozen men began jostling Dridi, groping her, then tearing at her clothes. A male colleague, Ashraf Khalil, placed her in a protective bear hug. ''The crowd surged in and then it went crazy,'' he told the Associated Press.

He also saw a bigger, darker picture: ''Sexual harassment is a 20-year problem here, but now there's a feeling of impunity, the knowledge that the police won't do anything, and it breeds this culture of lawlessness.''

Assaulted in Tahrir Square last year ... CBS correspondent Lara Logan. Photo: Supplied

It was not the first, second, third, fourth or even fifth time a foreign female journalist was sexually assaulted and had to be rescued by colleagues and passers-by while covering the Arab Spring.

In June, a British journalism student, Natasha Smith, 21, was sexually assaulted by a mob near Tahrir Square while filming a TV documentary. ''Men started ripping off my clothes,'' she told CNN. ''My skirt went, my underwear was ripped away, then my shoes, then the clothes on my upper half were just ripped off.''

During the height of the demonstrations last year, an American TV correspondent, Lara Logan, was sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square. She later told CBS: ''Hands grabbing my breasts, grabbing my crotch … They just tore my pants to shreds, and then I felt my underwear go, I remember looking up and seeing them taking pictures with their cell phones, the flashes of their cell phones.''

It was one of a string of similar assaults in the past 22 months as demonstrations spread through the Middle East after Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself alight in December 2010, in protest against police harassment. Lost in the scale of it all is that the official who pushed Bouazizi to the brink was a woman, Faida Hamdi, which heightened his sense of public humiliation.

The demonstrations against government corruption, which then swept through the region, claimed dictatorships in Egypt and Libya, rulers in Tunisia and Yemen, caused shake-ups in Morocco, Algeria and Bahrain, and took Syria into civil war. One thing has not changed - the treatment of women.

On March 9 last year, Egyptian security forces arrested 18 women in Tahrir Square. All were subjected to "virginity tests", ostensibly to prove no sexual violence had occurred.

Last November, a French TV journalist, Caroline Sinz, was attacked and sexually assaulted by a group of men and boys while covering the protests. Within days, an Egyptian-American journalist, Mona Eltahawy, was sexually assaulted by police while in detention in Cairo. She suffered broken bones in both wrists and later described a group sexual assault: ''Five or six [police] surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers.''

In March last year, a photographer for The New York Times, Lynsey Addario, was repeatedly sexually assaulted while held captive by a militia group in Libya. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, later expressed concern about reports of "wide-scale" rape in the Libyan conflict.

Today, Islamic fundamentalists are filling the political void in Libya, seeking to impose sharia and clamp down on the freedoms of women. Similar moves are under way in Egypt. Islamists also dominate the violent opposition in Syria, where there have been numerous reports of rape and gang rape by militias.

The brazen nature and number of sexual assaults against local and foreign women during the recent upheavals point to a widespread level of sexual repression that goes far deeper than the surface tensions.

In the May issue of Foreign Policy, Eltahawy wrote: ''Even after these 'revolutions', all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing, or divorce either. Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom.''

The statistics support her analysis. So do the photos of her wrists in plaster. There has been an uprising for democracy on the Arab street, but for women, the spring appears to be over, if it ever existed at all.