Arab News reports on the travails of the working Saudi woman: late night phone calls from one's boss, of course of a non-professional nature; childish behavior if one chooses to ignore those calls; ultimatums when one refuses to go on a date with one's boss. The Kingdom is considering passing a law that protects women from sexual harassment, but there's some skepticism regarding whether a law would resolve this issue:
… However, even if a law is issued, most sexual harassment cases would go undetected because of the unwillingness of women to report them, said Mazin Balilah, Shoura member at the Cultural and Informational Affairs Committee and the person who proposed the idea of having such laws. This leads to the question why women shy away from reporting harassment?
Well, I can think of a few, including embarrassment, fear of consequences – e.g. you are fired and your family suffers from the loss of your income/no one believes you and you are shunned/your harasser only increases his harassment … the list goes on. What's more, who would you even report an incident to if there is no law against sexual harassment? Your father or brother? So they can then deal with these problems for you, further compounding the idea that women can't take care of themselves? It's certainly complicated, and many women (not just in Saudi Arabia!) do not know their rights when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace. (I remember a long running public service ad campaign from my youth on sexual harassment that included the line “we’re talking about sexual harassment here, and I don't have to take it”. My YouTube search didn't turn anything up … ring a bell?) Irrespective, effective sexual harassment laws require educational campaigns for both men and women to make them effective. Part of this is informing people of their rights to prosecute, but most of it is encouraging a worldview wherein modes of communication that categorically make women feel uncomfortable or unsafe are not acceptatble.
Alaa al Aswany's book The Yacoubian Building features a young Egyptian woman as a character, Busayna, who encounters sexual harassment as a matter of course in her work at a clothing store in Cairo – I wasn't amazed by the book but this element of the story is rendered convincingly.
