It's a wrong number in so many ways. The BBC reports on the rising number of women in Egypt who report being sexually harassed over the phone, often by strangers. A recent survey put the number of women who were harassed or stalked over the phone at almost one out of four, mostly by men who are essentially cold-calling random numbers in the hopes of hearing a female voice on the other end of the line. Once they do, the calls keep coming.

The upswing in harassment could be blamed on a number of factors: lack of enforcement of harassment laws, discomfort with reporting harassment, the harassers feeling like they have a high-degree of anonymity (they don't, actually -- Egypt registers the name and addresses of mobile phone users.) But, the BBC also comes up with one fairly bizarre target: the high cost of marriage.

Said Sadek of the American University of Cairo told the BBC, "The only outlet for legitimate sex in Arab society is marriage, which is very difficult to afford these days. Repressed sex in Egyptian society manifests itself in many forms: crank calls, Arabic porn channels, harassing women in the street, secret marriages - it is a real problem."

But stalking women over the phone isn't an indication of money troubles or of the despair of thwarted romantics over the likelihood of ever getting married; it's an indication of contempt for women and their privacy.

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