Some were as young as 5, some were teenagers. A boy in a lime-green T-shirt darted out and grabbed me hard in the crotch. Then another, and another. A soldier, embarrassed, averted his eyes. The translator tried ineffectually to shoo them away. The crowd began to chant something in Arabic that I later learned had been a crude remark. When our strange parade reached the village police station, the officers fired their guns in the air to disperse the boys. One of the policemen grinned, offering, in a motion with his gun, to shoot at them.

In my experience, Muslim countries were not the worst places for sexual harassment. My closest calls came in Georgia with soldiers from Russia, a society whose veneer of rules and civility often covers a pattern of violence, often alcohol laced, toward women.

A military unit had allowed me to tag along after its seizure of the Georgian town of Gori. The men were drunk. I was working. It was dark with no electricity in a ransacked government office. One soldier became so aggressive with his advances that I found an empty room and barricaded it closed with a couch.

The following night, I walked into an empty hotel that was still closed from the fighting. A man who said he was a caretaker appeared. He stood close to me, watching as I unpacked my gear. He took a key and locked the lobby door from the inside. I asked him why, and he said he was protecting against looters.

The hotel was otherwise empty, and I began to panic. I told him that I had left something in my car. Please unlock the door, I asked. He opened it, and I left.

On the same reporting trip, I had to hitch a ride back to Tblisi, as the journalists I had driven with had left. A man in his 50s driving a beat-up Soviet-style car filled with peaches offered me a ride. He was talking amiably, when he suddenly told me to take off my shirt.

This seemed like a good time to demand that he let me out. But he refused and pressed, reaching over to me.

I yelled and fought back. He slowed the car; I jumped out.

He stopped and opened his car’s back door. Peaches spilled onto the road. He shouted after me, offering them.