During last weekend's hastily-arranged Gaza Peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, US president Donald Trump stood beside Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi before a hall of cameras and European dignitaries, among them Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, and declared with satisfaction: “There is very little crime in Egypt; it’s a strong system.”
The remark, made during a televised exchange later repeated on Air Force One, was more than diplomatic flattery. It was an endorsement of Egypt’s model of “stability through control” — a message delivered squarely to Western allies.
For Europe, whose leaders rely on Cairo for migration management and counter-terrorism, this narrative carries weight.
But the image of 'safety' Trump sold on that stage is built not on peace, but on fear.
Trump’s assertion paints a picture of serene order. The data expose a harsher truth. In 2020 alone, Egypt’s Gender-Based Violence Observatory recorded 415 violent crimes against women and girls — including murders, rapes, beatings, and electronic blackmail — with cases almost doubling in the year’s second half (299 vs 116) amid pandemic lockdowns.
A national survey found that 15.1 percent of women aged 15–49 experienced physical or sexual violence by a partner within 12 months. The 2005 and 2014 demographic & health surveys revealed that 29.4 percent of ever-married women had faced intimate-partner violence — 26.7 percent physical, 17.8 percent emotional, 4.6 percent sexual. In poor districts like Helwan, about one-third of women reported spousal abuse.
Outside the home, the harassment epidemic is relentless: 63 percent of women reported sexual harassment in public spaces, and among those aged 18–29, that figure rises to 90 percent.
A UN women study found 99.3 percent of Egyptian women had suffered some form of harassment, with 91 percent saying they do not feel safe in public.
Beyond gender-based violence, Egypt grapples with human trafficking, forced labour, and endemic corruption, all operating in opaque networks far from official scrutiny.
Yet the most serious crimes are those perpetrated by the state itself.
Human-rights groups continue to document arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture, and show trials, all justified under broad counter-terrorism laws.
Peaceful journalists, lawyers, and activists are jailed for “spreading false news” or “undermining national security.” Refugee women have reported rape and sexual assault in detention with no meaningful investigation.
Trump’s “no-crime” narrative, then, doesn’t reveal stability — it conceals systemic violence.
What Trump calls “strength” is, for many Egyptians, an omnipresent silence. In a country where oversight is weak and power centralised, “strength” often means domination, not discipline.
Civic life in Egypt exists under surveillance.
Independent media are censored or blocked; NGOs are forced to register under restrictive laws or close entirely. The line between national security and personal expression has vanished.
For ordinary citizens, safety depends on self-censorship: victims of domestic abuse, police brutality, or political persecution stay quiet — not because justice is served, but because complaint itself is dangerous.
Under this structure, criticism is criminalised. Tweets, reports, or even private conversations can lead to arrest under anti-terror or cybercrime laws. Courts serve the executive, not the citizen. Prolonged pre-trial detention — sometimes exceeding five years — replaces due process.
This is not the 'strength' of an orderly republic; it is the muscle of a security state
The absence of visible crime becomes the regime’s proudest proof of success. But it is a silence manufactured by fear.
The result is what Egyptians grimly call “the peace of the graveyard.”
Every statistic hides a story that the state prefers untold. Forensic data show that most female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners or relatives, often after domestic disputes.
Sexual assaults in public events have scarred the national conscience: during Sisi’s 2014 inauguration, a young student was stripped and attacked in Tahrir Square — a scene that briefly exposed the façade of safety before being buried by patriotic rhetoric.
Harassment is daily, not exceptional. Women commuting to work, riding the metro, or shopping in markets face groping and verbal abuse that go unpunished.
For refugee women from Sudan or Eritrea, the threat multiplies: without legal protection, they endure exploitation and assault with no functional system for redress.
Across homes, streets, and prisons, the pattern is the same: violence thrives where accountability dies. Egypt’s so-called stability rests precisely on ensuring that suffering stays invisible.
Trump’s comments in Sharm el-Sheikh were applauded by some, but they deserve scrutiny from Europe.
The European Union recently approved a €7.4bn aid package to Cairo, much of it framed around “stability” and “migration control”. If stability means the silencing of dissent, Europe risks funding repression while congratulating itself for peace.
True peace demands accountability. European governments engaging Egypt should insist on independent monitoring of detentions and disappearances, transparent investigations into gender-based violence, and space for civil society and free media.
Because stability without justice is fragile — and the 'order' maintained through fear is no order at all.
A state worthy of respect should not fear inspection; its citizens should not fear speech. If Egypt looks calm from a distance, it is only because its people have learned that silence is the safest sound.
If numbers could speak — and even though accurate reporting remains nearly impossible under Egypt’s suffocating authoritarian climate — they would reveal a rise in crime of all kinds: gender-based violence, murder, theft, human trafficking networks, and state-perpetrated crimes such as political arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, and unfair trials.
The absence of a free press and the impossibility of expressing ourselves openly in our own language and local media make one wonder: Mr Trump, which “crime” exactly were you referring to? And what did you mean by a “strong regime”?
Do you mean a regime so powerful that people fear to speak — that truth itself has become a punishable act, costing years behind bars for those who dare to write it, as happened to the author of this article once before?
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Shimaa Samy is an independent Egyptian journalist, and executive director of the Seif Law Foundation for Legal and Research Studies. She is also the project manager for a specialised initiative on migrant and minority women in Egypt.
Shimaa Samy is an independent Egyptian journalist, and executive director of the Seif Law Foundation for Legal and Research Studies. She is also the project manager for a specialised initiative on migrant and minority women in Egypt.