Figure 6.3: Women and the Arab Spring. An Egyptian woman holds up a widely circulated photo that shows riot police stripping and beating a woman during an Arab Spring protest in Cairo in 2011. Women have been very active in protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the region in recent years, and some groups, including parts of Egypt’s government, have felt threatened by this. Some female protestors have become a target for sexual assaults designed to make others perceive them as a dangerous, “dirty,” or immoral.