Male voices on sexual harassment: Emerging from the shadows of stigma

At eleven years old, Yassin ran away from his family’s home in Qalyubiya governorate. He was heading to his grandfather, but he lost his way, and his family found him. A year later, he tried again, leaving his room in the family house to escape harassment and violence at the hands of older family members.

By age thirteen, after repeated escape attempts, the sidewalk of Faisal Street in Giza became his bedroom. He started working as a tissue vendor, then as a car washer, until the 2011 revolution broke out, changing his life with it.

Yassin became one of the survivors able to recount his experience with harassment and sexual assault, a rare display of courage in a society where women fear admitting they have been assaulted due to denial and blame, while men view the same admission as an attack on their manhood.

Women’s testimonies break the siege

With every wave of testimonies about sexual violence, more victims are emboldened to speak out, and the cause gains new ground. Even the wave that surged last February against Mohamed Taher, founder of the Beit Fatem project—a Cairo cultural space—included the testimony of a young man who revealed he had been raped, accusing the same person of sexually exploiting him.

This testimony was only one link in a chain breaking the silence. Yassin had already recounted, on his personal TikTok account, the incidents of harassment and sexual violence he suffered repeatedly—the very abuse that drove him to flee his family’s home for the street.

When the January revolution erupted, Yassin began mingling with more people. Everyone was living on the sidewalk; he became one of them and felt warmth there. He used his talent for drawing to express himself, capturing what was happening on the street alongside its fears and dreams, finding an encouragement that restored his sense of humanity.

Most of the blame and stigma Yassin faced came from men

Yassin decided to turn those experiences and pains from mere lines on canvas into a public testimony he shared on social media, he tells Al Manassa. He says his decision to document his account stemmed from a legacy of pain built up when his family refused to believe him or protect him from the older children in the family. He decided to teach parents how to listen to their children and protect them.

Upon publishing his testimony, Yassin faced smeared reputation attempts and questioning of his manhood on the pretext that he was “abnormal, which is why men tried to do that to him.” It extended to his neat, well-groomed appearance, which they considered reserved for women, down to his tone of voice, described as “girly,” and his use of words like “thank you,” “excuse me,” “please,” and a few English terms during his early middle school years, which those around him viewed as feminine delicacy.

Strikingly, most of the blame and stigma Yassin faced, as well as the insulting and mocking messages, came usually from men, while he found significant support and encouragement from girls and women, who were the most attuned to this kind of pain, the most believing of his story, and the most capable of offering support.

Online uprising

In a post on his personal Facebook account, photojournalist Hossam Saber recounted an incident where he was harassed six years ago, shortly after graduating from university. What caught attention was the massive engagement with his post: it gathered thousands of comments and reactions and roughly a thousand shares, ranging from support to sarcastic comments and speculation. Most commenters saw a need to expose harassers regardless of the victim’s gender, without negative comments, victim-blaming, stigma, or questioning of his manhood.

89% of men who experienced harassment or sexual assault told no one and asked for no help

Later, Hossam wrote another post thanking every supportive and encouraging comment, affirming that what happened to him would not diminish his manhood and that he felt no need to act out to prove it; thus, he did not hesitate to expose what he experienced. He explained that timing his post six years after the fact came out of the encouraging atmosphere surrounding women’s campaigns to expose harassers during the confrontation against Mohamed Taher.

This is also what human rights activist Aya Abdel Hamid noticed as she gathered testimonies from harassment victims, tracking an increase in men sharing their harassment accounts recently.

“I know deep down these crimes happen, but they just stay hidden,” she tells Al Manassa. She emphasizes that the most critical driver in this confrontation was women’s courage in exposing harassers, noting that despite efforts focused on lifting stigma from male survivors of harassment, the difficulty of removing that barrier remains an ongoing crisis.

This aligns with the results of a scientific study showing that 89% of men who experienced harassment or sexual assault during the preceding 12 months told no one and sought no help. Many considered admitting what happened harsher for a man than for a woman, as male sexual harassment remains an unspoken issue in many societies, both Arab and Western.

Deeper shock for men

Harassment of men does not end with assault by other men; some are also vulnerable to it from women. In 2021, statistics issued by the Center for Community Protection at the National Center for Social and Criminological Research revealed that roughly 9% of men had experienced sexual harassment from women, and 4% were forced into extra-marital sexual relationships due to external pressure from female bosses or managers.

Political sociology professor Said Sadek views unwelcome sexual harassment as conduct rejected by the victim regardless of gender, adding that a man being harassed by another man produces a shock similar to what a woman experiences, with certain differences.

Sadek points out that the victim feels shame and fears telling others about what happened to avoid blame or doubts about his sexual orientation.

He notes that men sharing their testimonies is an act of courage in a patriarchal society, where victims usually maintain a deliberate silence out of fear that their identity and sexual orientation will be questioned, or that they will be blamed just like female survivors are.

Yassin’s experience—spanning a long journey of running away and being deprived of safety—marked a turning point in his life when he spoke out about the violence and harassment he endured. It pushed him to prove himself, eventually becoming an artist participating in local and international exhibitions and owning his own studio.

Through it, he sends a message to parents on the necessity of believing and protecting their children, and another to victims: exposing abusers is not a mark of shame on the victim, but a crime on the abuser's record for which they must pay the price.