How a new website is helping Lebanese women avoid sexual harassment
Activists in Lebanon have launched a new website to help women confronted by sexual harassment and bring discussion of it into the public sphere.
Cat-calling, men masturbating in public, and being inappropriately touched and insulted are part of daily life for some women in Lebanon. Such is their experience based on testimonies published on HarasserTracker.org, a website launched at the end of February by three young Lebanese entrepreneurs.
Nay el-Rahi and Myra el-Mir in Lebanon, and Sandra Hassan, based in France, have been involved in defending women's rights through professional and personal work with associations such as Kafa, a feminist nongovernmental organization focusing on gender-based violence, and Nasawiya, a feminist collective that ceased operating at the end of 2014. The launch of HarassMap in Egypt in 2010 was the three women's main inspiration for their initiative, the first of its kind in Lebanon.
“The website is a tool to primarily track and document harassment in Lebanon,” Rahi, who is in charge of content, explained to Al-Monitor. “We would like to document what's happening in the streets of Lebanon in order to use it as data to lobby certain political entities for some changes, like lighting, the sidewalks, etc., over concern for the general safety of people.”
Another goal is to redefine perceptions of sexual harassment and get to the point where it can be discussed in the public sphere without shame. “We hear a lot about people trying to define what is and what isn't, in their opinion, sexual harassment,” Rahi said. “Like when people say, ‘He was trying to hit on you! It's a compliment! Why don't you chill?’ — it is a habit of blaming the victims and defining things for them.”
