Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
I was walking down the street and a man driving passed, slowed down and started yelling, ” Hey Sexy, Hey Sexy hey sexy, come here let me talk to you.”
I showed no interest and started walking faster. He then sped up and drove around the corner and came back around and yelled out the window, “Bitch!”
– Anonymous
Location: Detroit, Michigan
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.
Yesterday was my last day at a job (that I loved) doing sexual assault and victim advocacy in the Washington, DC area. It was already a rough day because I really love the work that I do, but I am relocating and am planning on taking a break from that particular brand of advocacy because it starts to take its toll on you after a while. To celebrate/distract me from being upset, I had gone out to dinner with two good friends, and we got a couple of drinks afterwards.
I say goodbye to one friend headed in the opposite direction, and the other friend & I head back towards Virginia. We were fortunate to catch the last Orange line train towards Vienna, and my friend got off at Farragut West and knocked on the window after she exited so she can wave bye to me one last time. There were about 10-15 other people within hearing/viewing distance who smiled & laughed (because let’s admit it’s that’s not something you see every day). I said, “Well, that’s my friend for ya!” And folks nicely smiled, except for the guy sitting across the aisle from me who said, “That was funny. What’s your name?” I responded with a name, a fake one albeit, and he tells me his. He’s maybe about my height 5’6″ and looks mid to late twenties. I was texting on my phone and he says a few more things to me, and adds, “You look so serious.”
At this point, I knew he was going to just keep talking to me, so I politely turned to him and said, “I’m sorry, I’m just not interested in talking right now.”
Well, apparently he hadn’t learned to deal with minor rejection because he started muttering stupid stuff underneath his breath like, “Well I didn’t want to talk to you anyway.”
He continued reading his book and laughed out loud to himself. Then he got slightly louder so that pretty much everyone around him could hear, including me. He started calling me a crazy bitch, delirious in thinking I’m sexy, and that I needed to chill out and just go home, and other unstable ramblings.
None of it he ever actually said directly to me, but he was clearly talking about me. It continued to escalate and I began to feel extremely uncomfortable and I started to scope out other seats in the car I can move to. Pretty much everyone sitting ahead of me was avoiding making eye contact with me. We approached the Courthouse stop and I reached for my purse to move, and he said, “Oh fuck, you better not be getting off at my stop” and curses some more. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
After he exited, people were looking in my general direction, and I said, “Oh thank god.”
The young woman sitting behind where the harasser had been talked about how she couldn’t believe what he was saying and that he was way out of line. Another woman across the car leaned over to look at me as if to make sure I’m okay, and she smiled at me. Two young guys sitting two rows behind me spoke up and said that they couldn’t believe it and didn’t know what was wrong with that guy. They told me that if anything else had happened, they “had my back” and I told them I appreciated that, that it’s nice to know that there are people out who are willing to be helpful because women get harassed all the damn time and it’s terrifying.
And while I meant every word I said, I couldn’t help but think back to the job I had just finished that day and how we talk about bystander intervention. My fear would have been so much less, heck, I would’ve been far less mortified if they had just spoken up, said anything while it was going on. But, I know all the reasons people don’t intervene, and I can’t fault them for not wanting to put themselves in the middle of an escalating interaction. I was so rattled by the experience, that I decided to catch a taxi for the half mile between the metro and my apartment. After the driver remarked that it was a short distance (not complaining), I explained that there had been some creep on the metro so it just made me feel better, and he nodded his head in understanding, as if he had heard that story before.
The only humor we were able to find in all of this was that, as the harasser left, he said to me, “See ya later, Charlie Fucking Chaplin.”
The two guys behind me and I talked about what he possibly meant with that. Finally, the only logical reason I could come up with was that I had given him the silent treatment! Now I know that’s ridiculous, but it sure gave me a good laugh. I propose we start coming up with catchy nicknames to street harassment responses. To start, ignoring harassers will now be known as the Charlie Chaplin. 🙂
– Emily R.
Location: Orange line train to Vienna, Washington, DC
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 first International Anti-Street Harassment Day took place on March 20. Considering it was organized in only a month, I felt it was a big success. You can read a wrap-up article I wrote about it for The WIP.
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Via Hollaback Croatia, I was alerted to a 2007 study about sexual harassment on public transportation in Belgrade, Serbia. The report is not in English but Barbara at Hollaback Croatia translated the data for me.
Milena Raceta and Branislava Tanaskovic, who are in the psychology department at a university in Belegrade, interviewed 76 women, ages 20-29, in Belgrade, Serbia, about their experiences with sexual harassment on public transportation.
Of the 76 women, 96 percent said they’d experienced some form of sexual harassment, and 46 percent said it had happened more than twice.
The types of harassment they identified mostly involved physical contact: 66 percent said they’d experienced inappropriate rubbing, 58 percent said inappropriate touching, and 46 percent said a man had stood too near them. The rest had experienced other forms of harassment: 30 percent said men had inappropriately gazed at them, 22 percent said they’d been the target of public masturbation, eight percent said they’d experienced verbal harassment, and one percent didn’t specify the type.
The amount of physical harassment is stunning, especially compared with studies in Chicago and New York City‘s transit systems where the figures were closer to 10 percent, and I wonder if the verbal harassment is actually higher but the women weren’t identifying it as sexual harassment. Or maybe there is truly less verbal harassment than physical, just as there is in Japan, where there are high rates of groping on the subways but not high rates of verbal harassment.
1:05pm. I left my workplace for lunch and had not yet taken twenty steps before I spotted him, a 20-something man in a navy blue sweatshirt seated on a ledge with two friends. After being harassed for upwards of a decade (my entire teen and adult life), I can generally tell when it’s coming. But I determinedly squared my shoulders, looked ahead to my destination, and strode past him without changing my stride.
Sure enough: “You with the glasses – what’s *your* name?” It wasn’t a friendly question. He looked me up and down, leering.
I normally just keep walking when I’m harassed. I normally pretend to be deaf and blind, just to stay out of trouble. Just to stay safe, even if it’s the middle of the day on a crowded street.
This time, though, I was furious. I whirled around and snapped at him, “Why the hell are you talking to me, asshole?” then continued on my way. All I wanted was my damn lunch. Was it so much to ask to walk a couple of blocks and not have some random man turn me into a sex object? Was it so much to ask to use the public sidewalk without being treated like public property?
The guy whined behind me. “What did I do to you?”
I kept walking. After I’d gone another block, though, I noticed someone yelling in the background. The man and his three friends were following me at a slight distance. “BITCH!” I heard them yelling. I pulled out my phone, and heard “BITCH, TALKING ON THE PHONE!” I turned around and hollered at the top of my lungs, “YOU BETTER NOT BE FOLLOWING ME!” and kept walking. People stared at the men, but no one intervened. They kept following.
I turned a corner. They kept following. I had now crossed four blocks. Realizing that they might persist and might get actually violent, I dialed 911 and ducked into the busiest restaurant I could find. The officer who responded to my call kindly drove me back to work. The men had vanished after I went inside the restaurant, but we didn’t know where they had gone. I spent the rest of the work day furious and shaken. I called for a ride home but my partner was delayed at work. Ultimately I had to take the bus, which meant braving another area filled with leering men. This time I took the bus home without incident, but there had been incidents before and I was wary.
I am always wary. Always watching out for who might be a threat and who might be available to call upon for help. I cross the street to avoid men sitting on benches, because two-thirds of the time when I pass an idle man, he has something insightful and original to say about my ass or what he’d like to do to me. I feel like I live under a curse, a constant threat. And this is one of the safest, most liberal cities in the U.S. I shouldn’t feel like hunted game in my own hometown.
– Anonymous
Location: E. Liberty Street and S. Division, Ann Arbor, MI
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.