Egypt upholds ban on primary school teacher who molested 120 girls

Egypt’s Supreme Court has issued a final ruling banning a teacher who sexually harassed 120 primary school students in a school in Alexandria.

The teacher was dismissed from the school in 2013 after students and their parents complained that he had asked the girls to sit on his lap and then molested them.

An appeal was lodged against his dismissal but on Sunday the Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

Sexual harassment of women in Egypt is widespread. According to a 2013 UN study, over 99 per cent of women in Egypt have been sexually harassed.

In early February surveillance cameras captured a young man shooting his fiancée and then attempting to commit suicide himself.

Local newspapers reported that he became bitter when she rejected his attempts to reconcile and started to harass her.

Read: Egypt’s sex attacks on women are revenge for the 2011 revolution

On New Year’s Eve a video of a young woman being sexually harassed by a mob of men in Mansoura sparked outrage across the country over Egypt’s persistent problems with sexual violence.

Women who speak out about sexual harassment are often punished by authorities – Amal Fathy was sentenced to two years in prison on charges of spreading false news after she posted a video on Facebook discussing sexual harassment in the country.

In 2015 TV anchor Reham Saeed came under fire for airing photographs of a woman who was sexually harassed and assaulted in a mall in Cairo on her TV show.

Thousands of social media users signed a petition calling for her suspension.

The verbal and physical sexual abuse of women carried out by authorities is widespread in Egypt, particularly against political detainees in an attempt to put them off protesting, and activists have said that this spurs on men in the streets.

Women have been molested, subject to indecent body searches, raped and threatened with rape inside prisons, at checkpoints, on visits to prisons to see their families and inside their homes on raids.

Read: Teacher at Egypt’s Al-Azhar forced students to undress to pass exams