Rape victims and women's rights advocates lashed out Tuesday at the escalating attempts by the Egyptian government and news media to dismiss a plague of sexual assaults more than three years after the Arab Spring uprising began to expose the scale of the problem. 

"Those who insulted me and called me a liar, did you come to understand what gang rape means?" Yasmine Baramawy, who was assaulted more than a year ago during a demonstration in Tahrir Square, wrote on Facebook. 

Baramawy, who defied a severe social stigma by speaking out about her assault last year, was part of a wave of outrage sweeping the country over an online video of a mass assault on a woman celebrating in the square after the recent election of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. 

"It happened today, last week, a year ago, two years ago and it has been happening for years," Baramawy wrote, blaming "the filth of the Egyptian people, including the rapists, the excuses makers, those who called it a lie, those who politicized it and those who tried to cover it up." 

El-Sissi, the former army general who led a military takeover last summer, has promised to restore security and stability, and to re-energize the police force. But on the question of violence against women in public spaces, restoring the decorous silence that once prevailed here may not be easy. 

After three years of tumult and scandals, el-Sissi faces a public more aware of the problem and emboldened to demand a response. 

It is already goading his government and the Egyptian media to confront the issue of sexual assault, at least with words, in a way former President Hosni Mubarak never did. 

Mubarak's authoritarian government and Egypt's patriarchal culture often worked in tandem to suppress women's accounts of their abuse or police negligence. His ouster in 2011 set off recurring mass demonstrations, an explosion of sexual assaults in their midst, while the revolutionary climate encouraged a growing number of women like Baramawy to speak out publicly about their assaults, or organize efforts to fight harassment. 

The current furor was set off by the release Sunday of the video of the assault, which Interior Ministry officials initially said had taken place that day, during celebrations of el-Sissi's inauguration. 

But prosecutors said in a statement Tuesday that the assault in the video had in fact taken place several days earlier, on June 4, when a 42-year-old woman was gang raped in front of her daughter during revelry after the announcement of el-Sissi's electoral victory. 

If not for the video's dissemination over the Internet, the attack and others like it might never have reached the attention or aroused the outrage of the public. A coalition of advocacy groups said they had confirmed at least nine assaults in the crowd Sunday, and more than 250 similar mass assaults during the 15 months ending in January. 

El-Sissi, on his second day as president, issued a statement condemning sexual harassment as "unacceptable" and urging the Interior Ministry to "take all necessary measures" to combat the problem. El-Sissi singled out for praise a police officer - identified as Capt. Mostafa Thabet - who was seen in the video with his handgun raised struggling in vain to pull the limping, nearly naked woman out of the crowd. (By the time he had succeeded, she was motionless, badly bruised and fully exposed.) 

But the state news media and its allies on Tuesday escalated their efforts to link the attacks to the supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, deposed last year by el-Sissi. 

"The mass sexual harassment incident is planned to embarrass Egypt in front of the world," a headline declared in the flagship state newspaper Al-Ahram. 

Calling the video "fabricated," the article asserted without evidence that it had been contrived to strike back at el-Sissi supporters for snubbing a delegation of European election observers after they criticized the vote in which el-Sissi won 97 percent. Al-Ahram quoted an "expert" who said that another mass assault reported Sunday night as "a comical act" carried out by "young men and women who infiltrated the celebrations." 

Dalia Zeyada, executive director of the Ibn Khaldoun research center, said on a pro-government television show that the attack in the video was "a methodical act of terrorism" carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood "to distract the world" from el-Sissi's victory. 

Hamdy el-Fakharani, a former lawmaker, said on another program that, after military officials had notified him that sexual assaults were taking place, he had personally apprehended a member of the Muslim Brotherhood - "I swear, with a beard" - trying to film the incidents. 

Other men, el-Fakharani said, had been trying to undress a woman and her daughter while muttering slurs against "these Sissi people." 

The Muslim Brotherhood, now outlawed, blamed "the moral decadence" of supporters of el-Sissi's "coup" for the attacks, according to a statement on the website of the group's political party. 

Rights advocates accused both sides of exploiting the problem. "The same people who ignore this in a certain political situation are the first to use it as a tool against whomever they hate," said Mozn Hassan, executive director of the independent group Nazra for Feminist Studies. 

Eba'a el-Tamimi of Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment, one of several groups founded since 2011 to combat the problem, said capitalizing on the attacks for political benefit was "completely inhumane." 

Those who do so "are on the same level as the rapists," she said. But after an accumulation of graphic videos and women speaking out over the last three years, the scapegoating was losing its power, she said. "People cannot make excuses anymore."

(NDTV)