If you’re planning a trip to Jordan or relocating there for a longer period of time, some of the questions you might ask yourself as a woman are how to dress and if cat calling and sexual harassment are common. First of all, I hate having to put “how to dress” and “sexual harassment” together in the same sentence as if the former is the cause of the latter. I don’t believe that the way a woman chooses to dress should dictate the response from male members of any society, but I do realize that this is a longer process to reeducate an entire gender and it’s not an overnight process. I don’t want to go much in depth about what to wear in Jordan in this article, but rather discuss my personal experience with verbal sexual harassment in Jordan.
I’ll preface this with saying my personal experience also comes with having other countries to compare to. Growing up in the US, living in Spain, India and now Jordan, I’ve seen varying levels of how common it is to be verbally sexually harassed. Many years ago I lived in Amman for 10 months and now I’ve only been in Amman for 3 weeks, so it’s hardly enough to make a sweeping generalization of the entire capital city let alone the entire country, but I do feel that in Amman, cat calling and verbal harassment of women is not out of the ordinary.
I want to now speak about what you can do to stand up for yourself and take action if you wish to in the case you’ve been sexually harassed. Unfortunately, I learned how to do this by experience during my first week living in Jordan. We were downtown walking towards the Roman Amphitheater with my husband and two small children and one of the perfume shop vendors started making crude comments to me. I ignored comments 1 and 2, but by the third comment I couldn’t keep quiet and I asked him what he wanted? He was thrown off-guard and started denying he had done anything. A shop owner nearby saw how things had escalated and told me that there’s a police station just a few minutes walk away and we could lodge a police complaint there. We decided to do just that.
I wasn’t sure how the police would “escalate” such a topic of verbal sexual harassment. When we first went in it seemed they were confused on what to do, but they decided that as I’m a foreigner, I should file the police report with the Tourism Police on the top floor of the building. No one at the police department spoke English except for the officer handling cases in the Tourism Department at the station. They took my passport information (I had a digital copy on my phone which they accepted) and then took my statement. After that we went to speak to a different department and they asked us for more specific information about the person and the shop location as they relayed the information to a squad car that was patrolling the area. We couldn’t find the exact person so we ended up going in the police van to try to find him ourselves. After even that failed, we thought chances were slim to find him and we headed back to our car. My husband then got a call saying they’ve found the guy at fault for the sexual harassment and we had to go back to the station to identify him. We did just that and he admitted his guilt and we left. I’m not sure what happened to the guy, however.
This entire process took around 3 hours, but I left with a reassuring feeling about the police in Jordan and how they took very seriously the fact that a woman was harassed in their country. With that said, I can’t say if the same experience would’ve happened if a Jordanian woman was verbally harassed or if this only happened because I was routed to the Tourism Police as an American citizen. I wouldn’t like to consider that I would have more rights than any other woman that experiences the misfortune of sexual harassment.
After my experience, I encourage any woman that experiences sexual harassment in Jordan to report it to the police. I would only hope that you will feel as heard as I did.
My Amman Life 