We know. We just do — we’ve been seeing so many sexual harassment cases and stories, we’re just at a loss now. Sexual harassment is a horrifying reality that gets worse by the day.
Imagine this — you get harassed and beaten and you don’t back down. You try your hardest to get your justice. And everything stands in your way, from society to your own family.
You don’t have to go out of your way to imagine, though. This is exactly what has happened to Aya Abid.
In a harrowing Facebook post that quickly went viral, Aya laid out all that’s happened to her. With photos of her bruised face and ruined clothes, Aya begins her story simply:
Walking with a friend, she was suddenly shocked by a man cornering her with the cart he was pushing. As he cornered her, the man touched her body and Aya didn’t at all freeze. In fact, she cursed the man out.
Apparently, that hurt his pride because the harasser took his shoe and beat Aya up with others rushing to help him. If this isn’t horrifying enough, the men also touched her body as they beat her up. So where was the crowd?
Well, as Aya fought and hit back the crowd appeared and a good portion of them actually protected the harasser, hiding him until he could run.
At the police station, Aya was filing a harassment report, where she met the harasser who blamed her and got a medical checkup for the report from a doctor who didn’t insist on doing a full-checkup rather than relying on testimonies.
But that’s not all. Aya and her family were incessantly hounded by the harasser’s relatives and lawyer who kept popping up and telling her to “solve this out of the station” and that she was “like our daughter” and “to think of him (the harasser) in this“.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the worst part. No, the worst part is Aya discovered the filed report wasn’t a harassment report — it was an assault report.
And everyone tried to convince her it was the exact same thing, even though the report completely skipped over the sexual harassment.
Eventually, as the harasser’s relatives told her to “solve it friendly” and her own family didn’t see what’s the difference in reports, Aya Abid filed an assault report.
At home, though, Aya discovered that she had bruises on her body that didn’t make it into the report. And not only that — everyone was blaming her!
From a neighbor who told her she provoked the harasser by cursing to her own mother who told her that, of course, she couldn’t have filed a harassment report because of her “reputation”.
Reading this, you may see where the problem is now. The fact that Aya had to see the crowd protecting her harasser instead of her. The fact that her ‘reputation’ somehow has anything to do with this is horrendous.
Right after Aya’s viral post, a twitter hashtag started to support her and rightfully ask for her justice, but when can we stop relying on hashtags to get the basic minimum?
Well, we’ll tell you when. Until the culture of victim-blaming and shaming women for literally just standing up for themselves is dead and buried.
No matter how many times we’ve discussed this, we need to discuss it more because we’ll get nowhere until we get rid of the idea that fighting harassment harms your “reputation”.