Hend is not a Brotherhood member or supporter. But in the run-up to June 30 and Morsi’s removal by the military following mass protests, she said publicly that Egypt was in store for a coup, and that she feared Brotherhood rule would be replaced by what she described as Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s brand of  “military religious fascism.”

She publicly denounced the clearing of the Rabea al-Adaweya sit-in in August 2013 as a massacre. At this point, she says, the telephone threats started again. On social media, she was called a “Brotherhood whore." Someone tweeted her telephone number and described her as a Brotherhood supporter. Surveillance by plainclothes men, which had started under SCAF but stopped under Morsi, intensified.

Three men on rotating four or five-hour shifts stationed themselves outside her home, she says. They followed her. On one occasion one of the men followed her to a café, sat at the table next to her and ordered coffee.

“Then he looked me in the face and photographed me,” Hend says.

“The monitoring isn’t about keeping tabs, it’s a threat to tell me that they’re watching me,” she adds.

Matters worsened at the end of 2013. She has long known that her phone was tapped, but then printouts of her emails and private online chats with her partner were slipped under her door. At the beginning of December 2013, she was asked to go to the headquarters of the National Security Agency.

“They played good cop, bad cop with me. An officer said, ‘You’re educated, you can travel. Why don’t you leave the country?’ Then they told me that they had recordings of me speaking about the military during the SCAF era and that they would hand them over to the media and claim that they were made recently. ‘The people will eat you alive,’ he told me.”

Hend says she then received threats of violence ahead of a march to parliament the same month. She was told by security personnel that she would be arrested under the newly passed Protest Law which made protests held without permission from the Interior Ministry illegal.

On December 26, Hend was alone late at night in a secluded, non-residential, street of central Cairo. She remembers that it was icy cold. As she was putting things in a car she had borrowed from a friend, three men appeared from behind and grabbed her.

This story by Sarah Carr in Mada Masr is a very hard and very important read. It shows the lengths to which Egypt's new regime is willing to go -- the kind of unchecked brutality it's allowing if not encouraging. Reports of sexual violence against men and women -- always a feature of repression and detention here -- have been increasing in recent months, despite official denials. (There are also unverified reports on social media of Islamists taking revenge on officers who have committed sexual attacks).

This story reminded me of the plain-clothes creeps who threatened a female Egyptian colleague during the 2011 uprising, in an eerily similar way -- using a knife, very foul language, and threats of sexual assault. Except back then they didn't follow through with it. 

On today's podcast, we talked about the disturbing lawlessness that is the result of Egypt's political polarization and of the erosion of trust in state institutions. We didn't discuss the escalating sexual violence against women that has become a regular phenomenon at protests in Egypt. 

I think I know, for myself, why I haven't brought this topic up much. It's because I find it too awful. Read this article, if you can bear to, by Egypt Independent's (as often, daring to speak of a subject skirted by most of the media) news editor Tom Dale. I've read too many similar accounts in the past. They make me heartsick. And I would rather not write, and not think, of these incidents because I am frightened and confused by them. And ashamed for Egypt, a country I've lived in 10 years now. These acts -- let's just call them what they are, these gang-rapes -- do not fit with my experience of Egypt, where the constant harassment, the plentiful misogyny have always been balanced by a sense of being, fundamentally, in safety, capable of calling on those around me to enforce a shared code of decency, to stop anything truly terrible from happening.

I'm in awe of Egyptian women -- and fellow female journalists -- who continue to expose themselves to pain and danger and humiliation to participate in and witness this country's history. I commend the groups that are trying to fight this. I myself no longer feel safe in Tahrir. I don't cover daily news these days, and I don't go there.

I hesitated before titling this post, because it puts a knot in my stomach to place those words together. Because I worry that this post will be used to smear the opposition, to make hateful generalizations about Muslim countries. But it is the correct term (the assaults in Tahrir, although they don't generally seem to involve full sexual intercourse, definitely meet the WHO definition of rape). And for the women who are victims of these attacks...I can't think of a worse betrayal of their trust in their fellow-citizens and in the promise of the revolution, of their belief that they can safely join a peaceful protest in a major square in their capital city. 

This is not a reflection on the revolution that took place two years ago -- it is evidence of how far, and into what a dark thicket, we have traveled since then. Who are the men doing this? It almost doesn't matter, because where and how these attacks are taking place -- amidst thousands of bystanders, in the heart of Cairo, in the open -- indicts everyone. 

The story below, covered in The National, is disturbing in so many ways:

ABU DHABI // An 18-year-old Emirati woman who was charged with having consensual sex after alleging that she had been raped by six men retracted all her statements in court yesterday.

She told the judge she wanted to withdraw her accusations against all the defendants.

The woman, LH, offered no explanation in court as to why she changed her statements, other than being “unaware” of her actions when she reported the crime.

She added that her brother beat her after accusing her of talking to other men, and after the beating she went to the police to report the rapes.

If the prosecution drops the charge of consensual sex, the woman could face a lesser charge related to deception, which is punishable by six months to two years in prison.

If found guilty of consensual sex, as a Muslim woman, she would face lashes and a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Although she changed her evidence, the charges are criminal, not civil, so it is for the prosecution to decide whether to drop the consensual-sex charge. Prosecutors said yesterday that none of the charges had been dropped at this stage.

According to court records, on May 2, LH went for a drive with a male Emirati friend, HA, in Baniyas.

Prosecutors said she went with the intention of having consensual sex with HA, a charge she denies. HA parked his Nissan Altima in an area called Bahia and had sex with her, prosecutors said. He is accused of then telephoning five of his friends, who joined him and raped LH from 1.30am to 5am.

She went to the police after the incident and told them she had been raped by the men in the back seat of the car. She was tested by the Forensics Unit at the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department, and evidence of assault was cited by the public prosecution in charging all six men with rape.

First, consensual sex outside of wedlock being punishable by " lashes and a maximum sentence of life in prison" is sick. 

Second, the idea that when you report a rape you might be charged with having consensual sex is a horrible deterrent to report a heinous crime.

Third, this woman appears to have been pressured by her family to withdraw the charges of rape. Meaning they prefer not to sully the family name rather than punish the crime done against her. Of course it's hard to know the details, but the story outlined above does not look good. Presumably when she reported the crime, forensic evidence for what was after all described as a gang rape would be obtainable.

Most depressing is the last bit of the story:

When the judge questioned YM [a defendant accused of rape], he also denied having sex or confessing to rape. The judge chastised him as the young man visibly held back laughter, reminding him that if he is found guilty, he faces the death penalty, as do all the men accused of rape.

YM, when asked by the judge, declined to request a lawyer. After the judge explained that it was mandatory to have a lawyer where the death penalty is a potential sentence, YM agreed to find one. The two defendants in custody were both represented yesterday by lawyers. The young woman also did not appear with a lawyer, and she was not asked about appointing one. No member of her family was present in court.

Unsurprisingly, treatment of rape cases doesn't seem great in the UAE. The National has a recent story about a Kirgiz woman who claimed she was raped and ended up being charged with prostitution. Another recent story features an Indonesian maid sold into sexual slavery. Of course such sexual slavery happen everywhere — it's one of the major international forms of international organized crime — but the convergence of retrograde cultural attitudes to rape and what appears to be terrible laws in the UAE makes for a pretty terrible situation. Another piece shows how reluctant this makes women of reporting rape.