Going public after I was attacked was hard, but it helped me overcome the shame that so many victims feel

few weeks ago, I had a difficult conversation with my teenage daughter. It came out of something that happened to me more than a decade ago, and which changed the course of my life and work.

As a documentary photographer, I have travelled the world, taking portraits of survivors of trauma who shared their testimonies with me. It is a finely balanced exchange, in which they give me their trust, and my pictures attest to their resilience. But for many years, there was always a distance between us, created by the violence they had endured – a gulf I could not cross.

On the road, I have experienced many nights in random places, bad hotels, nocturnal drives along deserted highways. I have stayed awake all night, unable to sleep behind a door closed with a feeble latch, watching the shadows of men lurking in hallways. Often, I had no choice but to entrust my safety to strangers, some of whom gave me great support, while others made me feel threatened. While travelling on assignment, I have learned to be hypervigilant, always predicting a dangerous scenario and trying to avoid it.

In March 2012, I was subject to an attack. And it happened not in a shabby motel in some faraway place, but at home, in Cairo.

It was in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, that tortured period between a popular uprising and a military coup. Crime was on the rise. Gangs of bandits released from state prisons roamed the streets of the city, while the defunct police force sat back and watched. At the time, I often photographed people around the city. Even though the atmosphere was unsettled, I still felt like a free agent. I let my guard down.

On the night of the assault, I was on my way to meet a friend at the Cairo Opera House. I stopped a cab right outside my home in Maadi, an affluent suburban neighbourhood. We drove through the deserted streets of Old Maadi, with its decaying villas and endless roundabouts, relics of a colonial era. The empty streets made me think of the insulated lives of the wealthy. How untouchable they are, fenced off and tucked away in their ornate, gilded Louis-Farouk-style interiors.

Living in Cairo as an expat from Azerbaijan, I was among the sheltered class. While parts of the city crumbled, we had everything delivered to our homes, including groceries and alcohol. Our gates were protected by the bawabs, the faithful doormen who chased away strangers and street vendors on donkey carts. That night, I was going from Maadi to another wealthy neighbourhood, Zamalek, in an air-conditioned car with a seat belt and a taxi meter. I felt safe.

The traffic along the Nile riverbank drew to a halt. I beckoned to the driver to take the next exit and hit the ring road. Silently he nodded and made a swift turn on to a four-lane highway. Under the bridge, felucca boats blinking with lights glided over the black river surface like giant fireflies, blasting sha’abi tunes that echoed the car horns. I sat back and closed my eyes.

We began to move faster on the ring road, manoeuvring between cars. There were no street lamps along the road any more. When I peered through the darkness, I saw the outlines of identical red-brick housing blocks on each side of the road. This was definitely not the way to Zamalek, I thought. We were, in fact, speeding along the desert road, which led to Faiyum, south-west of Cairo.

For a second, I thought he was taking me on a giant loop just to jack up the fare on the meter. “Where are we going?” I asked in my basic Egyptian Arabic, which now had a tinge of annoyance – that unmistakable sense of entitled irritability many expats express when they realise they’re being swindled. With a slight delay, the driver replied: “Zamalek.” I caught a glimmer of contempt in the way he half-turned towards me, but without looking me in the eye.

“This is not the way to Zamalek!” I said. “Stop the car, I am getting out!”

This time he did not even turn, but continued driving, going faster. I looked at the back of his neck, strangely thin and frail. Illuminated by a passing car, his empty eyes were reflected in the rearview mirror. “Stop now!” I shouted in English. I heard the clicking of the central door lock. He made a U-turn and slowed down, finally parking next to a pile of construction rubble on the side of the road.

* * *

It was completely dark, except for the headlights of cars flashing on the highway as they flew by. I was more angry than scared. Wrong instinct. I should have got out and run the moment he stopped the car, but I hesitated. Before I managed to get the door open, a sharp, shiny object was pressed against my inner thigh. A knife. I finally took a good look at his face – narrow eyes, clouded with drugs or alcohol. It was the angular face of a man who could be both too young and too old for his age.

He told me to get undressed, gesticulating with the knife. I took my leather jacket off and handed it to him. He then gestured for me to take my shirt off too, but instead, I made a move for the door. He leapt forward and headbutted me. One, two, three blows, and my vision began to blur. I wasn’t sure if I was losing consciousness or if it was the blood getting in my eyes. Terrified of fading out, I summoned all my mental powers to stay awake and keep my eyes open. At this point I realised that he had pushed his driver’s seat back against my chest, which pinned me down, but at the same time, sheltered my body from his.

My thoughts were moving faster than my body, and my consciousness split in two: part of me was watching from outside myself and prompting me, telling me what my next move should be, like a football coach. I knew I needed to get out of the car. I kept reaching for the door, but he kept hitting the central locking switch. I unlocked it, he locked it. Back and forth. Each time I managed to open the door and get half of myself out of the car, he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back inside. He continued punching me. My phone was in my hand. I used its sharp corners to hit him in his temple and tried for that space between his eyes.

I tried to reason with him, told him I had money in my purse and he could just take it, about $800. “I will not report you to the police. I am a mother and a foreigner, just let me go,” I pleaded with the man. “Mesh a’aiz fulus,” he said, and hit me again. I don’t want your money.

Cars zipped past us without stopping. When I managed to open the door and crawl halfway out, I hoped someone would see me dangling and bleeding from the side of his car. A passing car began to slow down and pull over. The taxi driver caught a glimpse of it. “Meshi, fulus,” he said. I’ll take the money. “No police, OK?” He pounded me one more time in the face to reinforce his point. He took my phone, handbag and jacket. I scrambled out of the car and ran.

* * *

Should I have turned back to check that he was not following me? Should I have memorised his number plates? I did not. I just wanted to get home. I had no choice but to hail another taxi, trust another driver. A cab approached. This time a younger driver, whose face seemed kind. He saw that I was badly beaten, my face pulsating and swollen, with the blood gushing from the wound above my eyebrow, my clothes spattered with blood.

I told the taxi driver my home address. He kept apologising, keeping eye contact with me in the mirror. He kept pointing at the road signs, reassuring me that he was taking me home. “Maadi, OK?” He said, as we drove towards the highway exit. His kindness broke through my stupor and made me feel human again. I burst into tears of relief.

When I got home, my two-year-old daughter woke up and called me from the bedroom. I didn’t want her to see me, so I rushed into the bathroom, where, in the mirror, I caught sight of my face covered with blood for the first time.

I decided to snap a picture of myself for evidence, and put my bloodied clothes in a plastic bag. Naively, I thought I would take them to the police later for DNA sampling. Then I crept out of the house.

The taxi driver waited outside to take me to the hospital, where I was examined by the emergency doctors. They told me they were obliged to call the police since it was a case of assault. The MRI did not reveal any serious head injuries. I had a concussion and needed stitches for my face wound. The doctors advised me to wait for a plastic surgeon to make sure my eyebrow was correctly realigned, and to minimise the scarring.

As I was waiting for the plastic surgeon to arrive, a female nurse came in to ask me if I needed a gynaecological examination. I said there was no need, because I hadn’t been raped. Bruises were visible from the blows he delivered on my upper body, chest and shoulders. She asked if I was sure about it, giving me a questioning look, as if doubting my recollection of events. For a second, I wondered: what if he had indeed raped me and I blocked it out of my memory? But no, I remembered his car seat covering my body. The nurse left, but came back a short time later, bringing in a gynaecologist – a more authoritative figure. He took his turn and insisted he should examine me just to make sure. I repeated there was no need.

The young taxi driver refused to take my money. He stuck around for the police interrogation, since he had picked me up from the crime scene. I caught a glimpse of his face, timid and honest, surrounded by police officers who were rude to him, trying to intimidate him. He persevered throughout a three-hour interrogation and was forced to write a report. I was told to write an account of the events as I remembered them. Then write it again, and again.

* * *

The next day, after a sleepless night, I went to the police station in 6th of October, a sparsely populated satellite city along the desert road. I walked along the dusty corridors, past rooms with walls not thick enough to contain the screaming of the people inside. I found a police officer sitting at his desk, and he asked me to fill out more paperwork. I had to hand write several copies of my report because they did not have a copying machine, let alone a computer.

The policeman questioned my statement when I told him that I got away and was not raped. “Are you sure he didn’t do it? Because we could put him away for a long time,” he assured me. I told him that I would still like to see the man caught and punished, because he would most likely do it again to someone else. “Is it not a serious crime still, an attack on someone?” I asked. “It happens … ” he shrugged. I showed him my clothes in the plastic bag, but he sneered at me. “We’re not like the CSI Miami,” he said. I took the clothes away with me, and kept them in a bag unwashed for months.