Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
I was outed as a Female-To-Male transsexual by two men with a megaphone going down the road in a dirt-caked jeep, by making catcalls.
– Anonymous
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Find suggestions for what YOU can do about this human rights issue.
Read stories, news articles, blog posts, and tweets about street harassment from the past week and find relevant announcements and upcoming street harassment events.
Street Harassment Stories:
I accept street harassment submissions from anywhere in the world. Share your story! You can read new street harassment stories on the Web from the past week at:
Street Harassment in the News, on the Blogs:
1. SaraEileen.com, “A Many-Headed Serpent (on street harassment)“
2. Der-Morgenstern, “Seething“
3. Gender Across Borders, “Anti-Street Harassment and the DC Community Safety Audit: Part 2“
4. Bitch Magazine, “Takin’ it to the Streets: Walking Home with Nuala Cabral“
5. Persephone Magazine, “Micro-aggressions, Cat-calling, and Triggers, Oh My! A Record of Harassment“
6. Ms. blog, “Laying the Smackdown on HIS Candy Ass“
7. Small Strokes, “Guest Post: Educators’ Roles in Preventing Sexual Harassment in School“
8. Venus Genus, “A Man’s Perspective on Street Harassment“
9. For the Masses, “Ladies: Warm Weather is Upon Us and So Is The Enhancement of Street Harassment“
10. Mid-Day.com, “Now, ladies special in BEST buses“
11. Deccan Chronicle, “Not so fast but furious“
12. Gender Focus, “Women in Bangladesh: Rejecting Ridicule, Demanding Respect“
Announcements:
New:
* Needed: your feedback on international anti-street harassment day 2011 & your ideas for 2012 http://tinyurl.com/44f7bef
* Fight Street Harassment with Your Spare Change http://t.co/TKeve2e via @swipegood
On-going:
* Help fund the Hey, Shorty! on the road book tour to end gender-based violence in schools and on the streets.
* If you live in Atlanta, Georgia, take a MARTA survey so Hollaback Atlanta can better tackle harassment on public transportation
* College students, enter the Hollaback essay contest, entries due August 1.
* Are you in Egypt? Use HarassMap to report your street harassers
* Have an iPhone? Download the Hollaback iPhone app that lets you report street harassers
10 Tweets from the Week:
1. juliezeilinger First experience with New York City street harassment. I am not a fan.
2. kimhorne Ugh. Potentially innocent comments make me insecure. Actual #streetHarassment makes me a wreck. #notFitForOutsideLife
3. FeministLetters Feel angry & negative after more street harassment. I want to live in a world where I can walk the streets as a person not an object.
4. AmberLManning Semi drivers excessively honking at females is a form a cat calling/harassment. #sickofit
5. caracourchesne Just put my car in reverse to tell a #streetharassment dbag to #stfu. Don’t need it today or any other day, friend.
6. hadearkandil Over 80% of women in #Egypt experience sexual harassment. WE NEED TO END THIS. Pls RT. https://stopstreetharassment.org/ via @hkearl
7. Cillygrrl14 Thinking that I left Scotland largely because of street harassment & assault (two friends hospitalised), unsurprised at Edinburgh Council.
8. shannonmarie7 Rainydays are gooddays in NewYork. Women wear more &men have less to catcall @ Rain is not for the plants, it’s for us girls #newyorkcitymen
9. talkingparcel I will never judge women for wearing dark glasses when it’s not sunny again. They’re really handy #preventionisrad #streetharassment
10. musingvirtual #Mystique – if i could change appearance whenever i wanted to, i’d use it to avoid street harassment. /cc @katebornstein @hurlingthecat
After surveying passengers who take the BEST (Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport) buses in Mumbai and surrounding areas in India, BEST is launching women-only “ladies special” buses during rush hour on four routes to try to cut down on the harassment women passengers experience while riding the bus.
“Sunil Shinde, chairman, BEST, said, “We will commence four ladies special buses on the four most crowded routes in the city from June 1. This is a good initiative, welcomed by most. And putting an old tried-but-failed idea to practice again, the undertaking, which caters to 42 lakh passengers every day also plans to bring back women conductors aboard these buses….
We receive a lot of complaints on a regular basis about male passengers misbehaving with women,” said a senior BEST official on the condition of anonymity.
After having initially flirted with the idea of female conductors in 1998 it was even implemented for a short window of time but the transport body did away with it following harassment complaints by conductors the body is planning to resurrect it.
“But this time, the female conductors will be assigned to ladies special buses only. Women conductors earlier pressed into service had complained of eve-teasing and lewd comments from male passengers. After their request, we divested them of the onboard job of the conductor,” added the official.”
The routes and timings of the four buses are:
Route No 169: Worli Village to Plaza Cinema (Dadar) 0845 am
Route No 55: Lower Parel station to Kurle Chowk (Worli) 0850 am
Route No 154: Mahalaxmi station to Nehru Planetarium (Worli) 0905 am
Route No 343: Goregaon east to Nagari Nivara Parishad (Goregaon) 0925 am”
As always when a country starts women-only buses or trains, I wonder why they don’t do more to address the root problems rather than segregating women in a band-aid solution fashion, and, if they did want segregation to be the solution, why they don’t offer the service comprehensively so that all women can use it.
I was walking up to my boyfriend’s house. I was wearing a dress which actually suited me 🙂 but it was a little breezy and my dress kept blowing up a bit. I tried to hold it down. I had a few leers from men but what annoyed me the most was when a van honked at me just as my dress blow up again. Perv.
– Clarice
Location: North Cornelly, Wales
Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Find suggestions for what YOU can do about this human rights issue.
The Irish Times has a good article about sexual harassment and sexual violence, leading with the story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, who was arrested and charged with the attempted rape of a hotel employee.
“All sexual violence is an abuse of power. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the head of an internationally renowned body or the most popular guy at your local bar,” says Cliona Saidlear of Rape Crisis Network Ireland. Saidlear is responding to a story that made international headlines this week when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had been staying at the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan last week as the head of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested and charged with the attempted rape of a hotel employee who had gone to clean his room. That Strauss-Kahn, who resigned from the IMF on Wednesday, was such a powerful and influential man has meant the fallout from the alleged attack is being analysed all over the world.”
The article includes several stories that women submitted to the blog Harassment Monologues and there was even one about street harassment:
“She describes being yelled at by construction workers who went on to launch a sexually explicit verbal attack. “I was very shocked, and I reacted by striking an aggressive stance, locking eye contact and shouting, ‘You f***ing sick monster!’ I then told my mother about the incident, and she couldn’t understand why I was so angry. I was angry because I was shocked and felt violated. In any other context, roaring at someone in the street and giving them a shock is called harassment or antisocial behaviour. But for some reason, when it’s in the context of male sexual behaviour towards a female, it’s totally okay. It makes me sick.”
How true. And really, how true of all gender-based sexual harassment/sexual assault. Treating women like shit is okay all over the world and that’s got to end. We’ve got to keep speaking out to counter that attitudes and belief.
The explosion of news stories and dialogue that’s occurred this week around the Strauss-Kahn alleged attempted rape and the way it is shedding light on sexual abuse by powerful people only happened because his alleged victim spoke out and reported it. While we may not each get that kind of worldwide response when we speak out, unless our harassers/abuser is similarly very powerful, we can still make a difference and help create incremental change by telling our stories, reporting illegal abuse, and believing others who speak out.