Temperatures have dropped from blazing hot to balmy, the turquoise waters now have a refreshing chill and the sand is just about bearable to walk on. As winter arrives in this Persian Gulf city, the masses are thronging by the tens of thousands to its white sandy beaches, wearing, in an unlikely exercise in maritime coexistence, everything from black flowing abayas to slinky bikinis.
Thronging right alongside them are Dubai’s “beach pests,” the gangs of men who trudge through the sand, fully dressed, to ogle the women.
Mostly laborers at the front lines of Dubai’s building boom — toiling on manmade islands, innumerable high-rises, even a dome in the desert for the world’s largest indoor snow park — they flood the beaches every weekend to leer at women, photograph them and occasionally try to grope them in the water.
“They pretend to take pictures of their friends, but they are really taking pictures of you,” said Anika Graichen, 23, a German hotel receptionist who has lived here for three years. She lay on the beach last week trying to ignore various groups of men who passed by with their eyes locked on her.
She is almost used to them now, she said. “I think I can understand it,” she said. “It’s the only place they can have a look at women.”
Indeed, for the estimated 500,000 foreign workers here, most from the Indian subcontinent, the chance to spot a woman in a bikini may be hard to pass up.
They typically live in a Dickensian world of squalor, working 12-hour shifts six days a week, often denied their wages of about $150 per month for months at a time. Most of them secure work by taking out loans from recruiting agencies at home to get here, forcing most to stay on for years without seeing their families and loved ones. The workmen have become prevalent in DubaiÂ’s public parks and beaches as their numbers have swelled, and because of the lechery-on-the-beach factor, they are especially noticeable at this time of year.
They tend to beachcomb in groups, their camera-equipped cellphones always at the ready. Many do not know how to swim; some enter the water wearing their traditional robes, made of thin white cloth that becomes transparent when wet — and reveals far more of their anatomy than most beachgoers want to see. Incidents of physical harm to women are rare, though the police have arrested flashers and men committing lewd acts in public.
On Friday, Saifi, a metalworker who would give only his first name, walked along a beach with four friends, pausing from time to time to look around and chat. All in their mid-20s, the men were dressed in jeans and slacks. SaifiÂ’s bright orange shirt made him impossible to miss.
“I come here almost every weekend,” he said. “This beach has no problems, but the others have become more problematic for men.”
He meant the police. He said that he was stopped at another beach two weeks earlier.
“The police said to me, ‘Why are you here, why aren’t you wearing a bathing suit?’ ” he said. “Then they told me to leave.”
With a giggle, he admitted that the cause for his eviction was that he had been staring at women.
“Every man looks at a woman in a bathing suit when he sees her,” he said. “What can I do? I’m a normal man.” At a ladies-only day at a local beach earlier in the week, Nisrine Ben-Stitou, 28, a Moroccan citizen who moved here and works in a clothing store, said the harassment was such that she no longer went to the park or the beach on the weekend.
“Some people take pictures, which makes me crazy, or they stay and they watch you,” Ms. Ben-Stitou said. “I went one time, and I said I will never go back. I feel so free in this country and I feel safe, but what happens on the beach — I don’t know why the authorities don’t do something about it.”
Dubai officials, keen to attract tourists to the beaches, say they are trying. They have vowed to crack down with a security plan that includes plainclothes officers and a “three-strikes policy” aimed at keeping out the worst of the offenders.
“The goal is to get people to use the beaches for what they’re meant to be used for,” said Brig. Khamis al-Mazeina, director of Dubai’s Criminal Investigation Department, which polices the harbors and beaches. “There are naturally people who create problems and who are ignorant, but we intend to deal with them.”
Mr. Mazeina said his department had built new watchtowers to scan the beaches and added 35 undercover policemen to patrol as beach bums, looking for the first signs of trouble. Though many workmen fear being barred outright, Mr. Mazeina insists he intends to protect their rights, too, by ensuring that they are treated with courtesy and respect.
“When they see people hanging around for no reason other than to harass women or to try to speak with them, police are authorized to take action,” he said. “We want people to feel secure on our beaches, and we can easily spot people who are not there for the beach. We’ll be watching and if we see anything we will be getting involved.”
On a recent day, plainclothes officers stood atop a watchtower as several officers approached a man who had been photographing a group of women. The man and several of his friends were quickly brought up to the air-conditioned watchtower.
“If we see someone taking pictures like that, we are going to demand to see the photos,” said one officer, who identified himself only as Abdullah because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. He took the man’s camera phone and began flipping through the photos. “We would then delete the suspect photos and give him a warning.”
If the men are spotted taking photos again, Abdullah said, the police will make a formal notice; on a third episode, they will be barred from the beach.
The police say they have arrested more than 500 people under the new policy, the vast majority of them on immigration violations, and several more for outstanding warrants. But 15 were detained, according to police department records, for “a breakdown in public behavior.”
“You try to scare them a bit just to get them to stop,” Abdullah said. “Ask him, ‘What are you going to do with this picture? Would you like it if someone was photographing your sister?’ That’s usually enough to get the point across.”
"I've seen my sister's stuff - and she don't look like that! Woohoo! My gun... it's gettin all warmed up by itsownself! I'm feeling all funny... Say 'baaaaaahhhh'!"
Just think, Dubai's amazingly expensive tourist mecca PR thingy could be destroyed with just one measley gang-rape.