Shame Less: A Protest Against Sexual Violence

Shame Less is a documentary investigation of the matrix surrounding violence against women in Egypt. It aims at untangling the various factors and settings connected to gender-based violence: workplaces, homes, religion, the justice system, and the media, exposing the nuances of the worldviews and contexts that have culminated in the dismissal, normalization, or enactment of this violence.

Sexual violence is a pervasive universal problem with 1 in 3 women globally being subjected to it. Egypt, in particular, is a country where violence against women is extremely pervasive. According to a 2013 United Nations study, “virtually all Egyptian women have been victims of sexual harassment,” with 99.3 percent of the women surveyed in the study have been sexually harassed. The simple act of standing in the street can expose women to harassment and abuse of all kinds.

Last year, the Egyptian government committed to ending gender-based violence as part of the UN’s SDGs. We are yet to see this commitment being translated into compliance. Although Egypt has had its “#MeToo” moments, its effects have been rather transient, and its popularity has been limited to social media platforms where algorithms tend to create an echo chamber effect, resulting in the involvement of a limited audience in constructive conversation.

In December 2020, in response to the #MeToo wave that Egyptian women led in June of the same year, I decided to start this project. In protest and solidarity with other women against sexual violence, my initial intention was to fight the stigma that surrounds reporting sexual assault. The fact that more women are sharing their stories resulted in many of us realizing the magnitude of our ongoing, deep-rooted personal and collective traumas. This is especially the case when speaking up is punished by victim blaming, gaslighting, shaming, and, eventually, silence.

I have been verbally and sexually harassed in the streets, at home, and at work in Cairo, and I am enraged by the prevalence and normalization of the problem. In this first chapter, I want to spotlight the issue and fight the stigma around reporting assault.

This chapter of the project centers around Egyptian women’s stories of sexual violence in different public and private spaces in Cairo. The project is collaborative. I met the participants after doing a call-out on Instagram. In this chapter, I am layering the environmental portraits I made with the participants, with their handwritten text, and gold masking to protect their identities as per their request. The construction of the images reflects the shared journey and the evolution of my relationship with them, and with myself regarding the issue. It's a build-up of the narrative, and the dialogue between image and text was essential to navigating such a traumatic endemic issue.