Rozhdestvenskaya E.Yu. The phenomenon of taharrush as collective sexual violence. Logos, 2018, Vol. 28, Issue 4, pp. 157-186.

Abstract

The article analyzes the phenomenon of collective sexual violence, which was clearly manifested in Germany in connection with the influx of refugees and migrants in the last couple of years. In seeking to explain this phenomenon as the export of gendered forms of violence, the author explores its origins in the form of a secondary analysis of monitoring data, tracking escalation and discontinuities in the practice of applying sexualized violence associated with the political struggle during the two Egyptian revolutions. The intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, social problems and the crisis of power, considered in a number of studies in the monitoring mode, indicate bringing of political values ​​into sexualized violence or about the instrumentalization of sexual violence by political forces in the struggle for power. In this context the practice of collective sexual violence called taharrush and its legitimation in the discursive space of modern Arab culture develops. Obviously, after a decade, this practice, directly and indirectly, through discursive legitimations, contributed to the masculine socialization of young generations of Arab men. This type of masculine socialization is built on certain social norms that justify the use of violence against transgressors the moral and religious boundaries of women, and is also associated with the performance of violent potential in public space. The experience of participation in Tahrir as a symbolic achievement of hegemonic masculinity made it possible to compensate for the gaps of masculinity for those who experienced economic deprivation due to unemployment, and thereby restored male hierarchies. Perhaps in the long term, recomposition of the Taharrush phenomenon in another, already western context of emigration, his explanation is not only the continuing economic, social, psychological, sexual deprivation of refugees from the Arab world, but also socialization through direct and indirect practices of taharrush.