A Note from Cairo

Some weeks ago, I came across a Facebook post about journalist Soulafa Magdy, a political prisoner who was just recently released from months in remand detention. The post relayed a complaint by her family because Soulafa, while in custody, was stripped of her clothes, dragged naked across a cell floor and beaten so hard that she started bleeding from her vagina and was left without any medical care. The image of this incident passing on my timeline did not leave me for days. It made me fall silent through dinners, romantic conversations, car rides, and in the safety of my own home—which happens to be next door to a police station.

I believe that most women around me have also normalized that this is what crowds our minds: the pervasiveness of sexual violence on every plane, from the public to the private, in our context makes the task of writing an overview on the subject matter extremely complicated.