ABHA, 25 January 2007 — It never came to the mind of Nada Mousa, a Saudi high school student, that a sexual pervert would be waiting for her outside her school as she walked back home. But that is exactly what happened one day recently.
Nada was on her way home after a long day at school and she noticed that there was a car slowly driving behind her. She did not pay any attention to the car but after two minutes she looked back and she saw the same car still crawling behind her. The car came so close to her that it nearly hit her. When she looked, she found an old man in his late fifties driving naked! Nada was shocked and for around ten seconds she could not talk or shout.
She then shouted at the man to stay away from her and cried for help. She ran back to school terrified. The old man reversed his car and drove back to catch her. By that time, her friend Hana, who was waiting outside the school for her parents to pick her up, saw her friend running back to the school and a car chasing her. It did not take her long to realize that her friend was in trouble and she thought that it was a kidnapping attempt. She quickly picked up some rocks and called for more friends to come and help her. They threw rocks at the old man’s car and managed to smash his rear window before he took off. Nada sat on the sidewalk crying hysterically, plainly in shock.
According to the many girls interviewed, this was not the first time that they faced harassment from men of all ages. Some said that they could understand teenagers harassing them, which they said was normal behavior at their age when their hormones are raging, but that they couldn’t understand why men the age of their fathers and grandfathers were harassing them.
Hela M., another Saudi female high school student, recounted a painful story in which she was beaten up by a group of men.
“I was on my way home from school one day when two men blocked my way. I tried to walk backward and I found that there were two other men blocking my way behind me. Without any reason, they started to beat me up and then they carried me and threw me into the garbage and ran away,” she said.
Hela added that Indian expatriates working in a shop nearby, who had seen the entire incident take place, helped her out of the garbage dumpster and took her back to school. She was in total shock and was absent from school for a whole week because she was afraid that her attackers might come back again and harm her. “I think this was their way of having fun,” she said.
Other students said that there were other ways to deal with this problem, one of which was calling the police.
“You will be surprised to know that many girls do not call the police when they fall victim to such harassment because their families have instructed them not to. Families fear that such incidents, if reported to police, will bring shame to the families because the news will spread everywhere. This very silence by families is what is encouraging the harassers to continue attacking students,” said Fatima.
At the same time, police have increased their presence around schools at the beginning of the school day and when students go home, in order to put a stop to the harassment.
A high school teacher, who did not want to be named, said that despite the increased police numbers and the presence of members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the problem still continued. She said that harassment is not only limited to the students, but also affects teachers and older women who live near schools. She said, “I was eight-months pregnant when I was on my way home from school when a Saudi man pulled up next to me in his car and started to flirt with me. He offered me a ride back home. I was eight-months pregnant and that did not stop him from harassing me.”
A security source from the Asir Province, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said that in the past the safety of students was the sole responsibility of the police. With the new procedures introduced by the Interior Ministry, the safety of students became the responsibility of the Traffic Department and the police too. He said that each police unit is assigned to monitor one school. If a man is caught harassing students, he said, the punishment “ranges from two days in police detention to 30-60 lashes depending on the type of harassment. It is not classified as a serious crime, unless kidnapping or rape is also committed.”
He said that the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice played an important role in limiting this problem. He said that they often face trouble when they investigate a girl’s harassment complaint because they cannot talk to her without the presence of a male guardian.
“I blame a lack of awareness on the part of parents who discourage their daughters from reporting harassment cases to the police because of the shame that some feel in seeing a woman reporting a case in a police station. Many of them believe that if she reports sexual harassment then she will never be able to get married,” he concluded.
