Breaking the silence: A corpus-assisted analysis of narratives of the victims of an Egyptian sexual predator

Abstract

Abstract Beginning in July 2020, Egyptian social media were flooded with stories about a young man raping and sexually harassing about 100 women and under-age girls. An Instagram account called @assaultpolice posted narratives of the man’s victims reporting the verbal and physical abuse they were subject to. The whole set of issues about the sexual activities of this man, who was dubbed the “Sexual Predator,” trended on Twitter and Instagram and was then picked up by many Egyptian talk shows. The issue received much attention because of the conservative nature of Egyptian society in which the tendency to blame victims of sexual abuse leads to their remaining silent about any abuse they have suffered. The power of social media in highlighting these narratives, and ensuing similar ones, has helped the whole community to realize the severity of the problem of sexual harassment. This resulted in a push for an amendment to Egyptian law in 2021 placing harsher penalties on crimes relating to sexual harassment and concealing the identity of victims. This article uses a corpus-assisted approach to analyse the discursive strategies used in these narratives to explore the discursive construction of the sexual aggressor and the victims. The analysis shows that the narratives are told from the perspective of the victims, with access always given to the victims’ inner feelings and perception, and that the male abuser is constructed as the active agent while the female victims as acted upon.