The harassment project: a bolted door has been opened

The challenge of acceptance or rejection
By Iman Abu Saeed
The project's idea represents a great challenge to the culture of conservative Gazan society. When we began the project we had no doubt that we would face many difficulties, the first of them raising this sensitive subject with full seriousness and courage, and the last of them discovering cases of children who were victims of sexual harassment. The source of this certainty was the closed, conservative and bashful culture of society, if that is the right expression. And this is indeed what happened: there was great apprehension among the partner associations on the project about whether the project's idea would succeed, on the claim that parents, fathers and mothers alike, would not accept such a subject and that we would be swimming against the current and carving into rock. But what we found on the ground was somewhat different. As soon as you begin to speak to parents and prepare them indirectly for the project's idea by asking them about the problems our children may face in society, they list many problems such as poverty, deprivation and child labour, and they mention the problem of sexual harassment shyly in some meetings, or do not mention it at all. It is then raised and explained as one of the problems children suffer from, and at that point we see embarrassment drawn clearly on the parents' faces at the mention of the words "sexual harassment", as if we were speaking of things contrary to modesty and morals. That is at the start; but as the subject is developed and its importance stated, the parents begin to engage greatly with it, as though a flood of information they were not used to hearing had come down on them from the sky. You see them never stopping to ask questions, or recounting stories they had heard of or that had happened to them personally, and ending by offering their recommendations to hold sessions in marginalised places they see as being in the greatest need of this knowledge.
It was noticeable how deeply parents thirsted for more information, as though a closed door had been opened before them for them to speak of what was on their minds: stories that had happened to them, memories they had chosen not to speak of and had bolted the doors upon. I believe the time has come and the opportunity has arrived to answer questions that had long kept them awake. They preferred silence and embarrassment for fear of scandal, and did not realise that they were the victims.
These are important indicators of how much parents need education on the subjects of sexual education, in order to break the barrier of embarrassment on the one hand and to protect their children from sexual harassment on the other, and that will only happen by conveying the project's idea to the largest possible number of groups in society.