Marlene Tadros, a veteran Egyptian human rights activist, was so enraged to hear a male activist tell a visiting U.S. official there was no wife beating in Egypt that she set out to prove him wrong.
She began interviewing women in Cairo in January and now jokes she might as well fill in the rest of the questionnaires herself because her findings were depressingly uniform.Each of the nearly 200 women she talked to has been beaten.
A larger survey showed a lower rate - about one woman in three since marriage - but it confirmed Tadros's findings that most women thought husbands sometimes had a right to beat them.
"Very few of the women stood up to the men. They're taught this is the natural thing. Some even said this is what marriage is about," said Tadros, executive director of the Legal Research and Resource Center for Human Rights.
A 30-year-old woman said her husband was first violent on their wedding night and continues to beat her with his hands, a stick and cables. He throws cups and plates at her, kicks her, pulls her hair and swears at her, the woman said.
The reason for his violence is mainly to obtain sex, but she said her security guard husband also beats her if she asks for more household expenses and that he beats their daughters, too.
"On my wedding night he was a stranger. I pushed him away from me so he beat me up. Now, he beats me up and sleeps with me and says it is not up to you. He is stupid and merciless. He is heartless. He is not a human being," the woman said.
The women who spoke to Tadros live in a low-income area and are mostly illiterate.
The larger survey, published by the government's National Population Council (NPC), says that domestic abuse cut across educational and income levels.
It also said that 86 percent of woman interviewed for the study agreed that husbands are justified in beating their wives under at least one of six scenarios presented to them.
Women were most likely to agree that men are justified in beating their wives if she refuses sex or answers him back.
The other scenarios in descending order of acceptability were if the wife talks to other men, if she neglects the children, if the wife wastes money and if she burns food.
Of the one-in-three women beaten at least once since marriage, 45 percent had been beaten at least once in the year prior to the survey and 17 percent had been beaten three or more times in the same period, it found.
Official figures on domestic abuse are rare in Egypt. Activists say the study, for which researchers interviewed 7,121 women aged 15 to 49 who were or had been married, is believed to be the largest on the topic.