Online Sexual Violence in Egypt
Documenting and Analyzing Incidents of Online Sexual Coercion and Extortion (2019-2022)
Discussion
The data contained in press news about OSCE crimes represents the only source of
information about such crimes in light of the lack of official data about them from the competent authorities in the country. Although journalistic sources are not considered comprehensive nor representative statistics, they are an open source of data that can be relied
upon at any time and contribute to providing indicators about the rates of spread of these
crimes in our society.
The analysis of the results revealed the following issues related to the way the
Egyptian press presents incidents of sexual coercion and extortion:
Centralization of Detection: Most journalists focused on covering events
occurring within major urban governorates, while the remaining governorates
did not receive the same attention. This seemingly explains why most OSCE crimes
are concentrated within the governorates of Cairo (19.5%) and Giza (15.9%).
Detection Seasonality: There is a notable discrepancy in the volume of
press published about incidents of OSCE across the years represented in this
report. The annual distribution of OSCE incidents sharply increased to 50.3% in 2022
as compared to 16% in 2021. This increase in publicized incidents could be explained
by the “Heidi and Basant” case when two Egyptian girls committed suicide in early 2022
after being subjected to OSCE(11)(12) , Despite issuing the coercion law in 2018,
the Egyptian press’s increased publications of OSCE occurrences correlate to
sensationalized events with strong public opinion. After the death of Heidi and
Basant, Egyptian media covered several OSCE incidents, which could have potentially
had an impact on both the future incidence and report submissions.
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