But women’s rights advocates say the bill would do nothing to protect women from social attitudes and scorn that assault victims face in hospitals and police stations — not to mention in the Parliament — if they try to bring legal complaints.
Ms. Moheeb said in an interview that after she was attacked, nurses told her to keep silent in order to protect her reputation.
With police protection negligible, some women are taking their security into their own hands. At a recent march to call attention to the sexual attacks, several women held knives above their heads. “Don’t worry about me,” said Abeer Haridi, 40, a lawyer. “I’m armed.”
Members of the political elite, meanwhile, have appeared more concerned with blaming one another. The Muslim Brotherhood “plotted the sexual harassment in Tahrir Square” to intimidate the demonstrators, asserted Mohamed Abu Al Ghar, the president of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party.
The Muslim Brotherhood said opposition leaders “ignored the brutal party of harassment and rape” in the square, according to a column on the Brotherhood Web site. The rapes are “a disgrace on their foreheads,” the column declared.
Other Brotherhood lawmakers faulted protest organizers for failing to segregate the demonstrators by gender as the Islamists usually do.
Some ultraconservative Islamists, now a political power alongside the Brotherhood, condemned the women for speaking out at all.
“You see those women speaking like ogres, without shame, politeness, fear or even femininity,” declared a television preacher, Ahmed Abdullah, known as Sheik Abu Islam.
Such a woman is “like a demon,” he said, wondering why anyone should sympathize with those “naked” women who “went there to get raped.”
Ms. Moheeb called such remarks “scandalous” and accused Islamist lawmakers of being complicit.
“When ordinary people say such things, ignorance might be an excuse,” Ms. Moheeb said, “but when somebody in the legislature makes such comments, they’re encouraging the assailants.”