On the International Women’s Day. Egyptian Women Struggle For Freedom

Women have suffered numerous violations under military rule in Egypt to-date. Dozens of elderly women and underage girls have been arrested and detained in prisons among hardened criminals, in violation of Egyptian laws and international conventions, which prohibit detaining minors on remand and criminalize placing them with adult criminals in the same cells.

A large number of women were arrested at army checkpoints in the streets or during their return from anti-coup demonstrations to their homes – the reason given for the arrest being their political affiliation and rejection of the coup.

Sumaiya Shawwaf was arrested as an act of vindictiveness against her father, Dr. Abdul-Rahman Shawwaf, who was also arrested as he worked as a volunteer doctor at field hospitals in all the massacres in Cairo. She was arrested from her home, in the middle of the night, by 20 Central Security Force recruits dressed as civilians who descended on her home in a convoy of 9 Central Security Force vehicles. She was thrown in the back of a prisoner transport van among a group of hardened criminals, all men.

Women suffered violence at the hands of police and military forces. They were beaten, dragged on the ground, humiliated, threatened with sexual harassment, because those security forces know that they would not be held accountable "according to a statement leaked by a security official". At least one woman (of no political affiliation or activity) is known to have been raped while passing through an army check point during the curfew.

Further, police and army snipers have deliberately shot women dead, especially those who were taking photographs. They were immediately shot in the chest in unprecedented violence and cold blooded acts of murder never seen before in Egyptian society. This happened in Rabaa Al-Adaweya, Nahda Square, Ramses Square and Mansoura massacres. In Mansoura, women were attacked by thugs and security forces in civilian clothes who attacked their peaceful march and targeted women, killing four. The youngest of the murdered women there was Hala Abu-Sheasha, who was shot dead with treasonous bullets in the back, in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.

In a continuation of the same approach of ‘maximum force’ that indicates a deliberate security strategy to break the will of nonviolent demonstrators, female student Rofaidah Sayf was killed by sniper-fire in a peaceful march on October 6, 2013 in Beni Suef and Somaya Abdallah on January 25, 2014.