Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Archives for 2011

“We need to change the society that lets street harassment occur”

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An op-ed I wrote about street harassment was published today by the Christian Science Monitor. Here is an excerpt, I hope you’ll read the full article!

While the prevalence of street harassment may be new to many men who read or hear about it, it’s not to women. For generations, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and older sisters have shared tips and advice to girls to try to keep them safe from men: Don’t go out alone after dark. Memorize a fake phone number. Carry mace. Dress conservatively. Ignore them.

But it’s time to go beyond that well-intentioned advice which makes women feel less safe and often doesn’t work. Given how widespread street harassment is, those tips have the effect of limiting women’s access to public spaces. It keeps them on guard, off the streets, and dependent on men as escorts. No country has achieved equality and no country will until women can navigate public places without experiencing or fearing street harassment.

Four key steps

As a first step, everyone must acknowledge that street harassment is not a compliment, a minor annoyance, or a woman’s fault. It’s bullying behavior. The harassment is often directed at teenage girls and young women because it’s assumed they are too young to know what to do or how to respond, especially when the harasser is an older, larger man. And often the harassers are correct.

So, second, we need to give girls and women real help. We need to teach them empowering, assertive responses, self-defense, and how to report harassers. Ignoring and avoiding harassers changes nothing. It is disempowering and limiting.

Third – and perhaps most important – we must focus on potential and current harassers. We have to stop looking the other way or saying “boys will be boys” when we see harassment. Fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends need to stop trying to bond with other men through objectifying, harassing, and raping women. And just because men have the ability to access girls’ and women’s bodies through pornography, strip clubs, mail order brides, and brothels, doesn’t mean that they should.

Organizations like Men Can Stop Rape, the Coaching Boys into Men program at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and the global Man Up Campaign all focus on healthy definitions of masculinity and teach boys and men how to respect themselves – and women. These initiatives are fantastic and need our support, and we need more organizations like them so we can reach every young man.

Finally, we need to change the society that lets street harassment occur. We must challenge comments, forms of media, and policies that disrespect and discriminate against women. We must challenge all gender-based violence and harassment; it’s all interrelated.

The problem may be massive, but each of us has the power to chip away at it right now. Learn more about street harassment, share a story, talk to someone about it, and find and share strategies for dealing with it and ideas for ending it.

If you care about the current and next generation of girls, if you support equality, if you believe in human decency, then don’t sit by. Do something.

In short, street harassment must end.

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Police officer stares, makes kissy faces at woman

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Last year, I was sitting at a bus stop and a police car was stopped in traffic right ahead of me. The policeman inside kept staring at me and wouldn’t stop. He eventually started making a kissing face at me. It was disgusting. I was 22 and he appeared to be in his 50s. I have several street harassment stories but this one was the most disturbing because it was a policeman doing the harassing.

– Anonymous

Location: Westwood, Los Angeles, California

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.

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“The threat doesn’t need to be overt to be real”

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Last spring my four-year-old son and I were taking the subway home after a lovely morning in the city. As we waited for the subway, a man approached and asked me for the time. It was only later, thinking back on the situation, that I was aware of the observations and judgments I started making automatically, not because I could foresee a problem with this specific man but because as a woman I’ve been trained to think of public spaces as hostile territory. From the second he moved in our direction, before he had done anything particularly odd, I was on high alert. Where was he looking? How fast was he moving? Could I see both his hands? Was he trying to talk to my son? After I’d given him the time, how far away did he move, and how fast?

He moved far enough away that he appeared to be about to board a different car when the train arrived. I kept my eye on him and I can’t say why I did, at first. I don’t know if there was something about the way he was standing, or if he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, or if he was simply a man who had made contact and that was enough for me to consider him a threat.

At the last minute, he ducked into our car and sat several rows behind me and my son. In various reflections, I could see him staring at the back of my head. This is the point at which I started making plans – identifying other people on the train who could help me if it came to that, considering when I should get off the train, and what I would do if he followed me. My normal stop is near the end of the line and I hoped he would get off first.

At the next stop, though, as people exited and boarded, he got up and moved through the half-empty car to the seat directly in front of me. He sat sideways, his face maybe eighteen inches in front my own, and stared straight out the window across from me. I tried to stare him down, but he refused to make eye contract; each time I turned my own head, to check our location, or to reassure my son (who was beginning to pick up on my distress), the man would turn *his* head and stare at me. Then he would turn again to look out the window when I turned my face back.

Now I was really starting to become afraid. I think most women have mental boundaries by which we categorize street harassment, and this guy was crossing lines like crazy. Initiated unnecessary contact, check. Kept giving unwanted attention, check. Now he was violating my personal space, and the worst part (oddly) was that he wasn’t engaging. I’ve blown off my share of persistent assholes who keep trying to have a conversation I’m clearly not interested in having. This guy was escalating with no clear end in sight – he was obviously *waiting* for something, an opportunity to take some action involving me and/or my son that he wasn’t willing to do around other people in an enclosed space.

As each stop approached, the man would place his hand on the backrest and tense up, watching me out of the corner his eye, clearly preparing to follow us whenever we exited the train. Several stops before our own, I waited until the last moment, then grabbed my son and got off the train as quickly as I could. It wasn’t fast enough; the man jumped up and followed, close enough that when I wheeled and ducked into a covered bench area (with a few other people already inside), he sideswiped me. He paused for a second, as if trying to decide whether to stop or not, then kept moving. He locked his eyes with mine and stared me down as long as he could maintain eye contact.

The next fifteen minutes, waiting for the next train to arrive, where horrible. I kept checking the entire platform; I was the last to board the train so that I could be as sure as possible he hadn’t come back; when we arrived at our stop, I waited on the platform as the entire train emptied. I checked over my shoulder a hundred times on the way to the parking lot.

Writing this down still makes me shake. And why? Nothing happened. A creepy guy sat too close on the subway, big deal. The entire episode lasted less than forty minutes. It’s easy to wonder afterwards if you’re being “hysterical” or “over-sensitive”, particularly because street harassment is so often characterized as benign or just the price you pay for daring to exist in public.But I can safely I’ve never been that frightened before, and I’ve lived in big cities, and dealt with street harassment, my entire adult life. Having my son with me obviously increased my fear a hundredfold, both because I was afraid for him, and because of what it meant that the man was crossing all those boundaries with no regard for a child being involved.

Hearing the story later, my husband was sympathetic but couldn’t really understand why I was so freaked out. The women with whom I shared the story, though, reacted with total outrage. They got it. The threat doesn’t need to be overt to be real. And that’s the real cost of street harassment: women having to make a conscious threat analysis every time they leave the house, and avoiding the situations that just aren’t worth the risk of harassment or worse. It makes me sick.

– Anonymous

Location: Baltimore, MD

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.

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“Look how fat that girl is”

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I have been harassed yet again this week.

Yesterday I was walking down the street with my boyfriends mother when three boys on bikes said, “Look how fat that girl is” along with a shout of “Fatty”! I was wearing a sun dress because it was a very hot day. I felt good in this dress, now I don’t even want to wear it. That cruel remark has destroyed any confidence I had wearing it.

When I got to my destination, I was upset and other people noticed. I told them about the boys and they told me not to take any notice of them. But thats so easy for them to say. I was upset for the rest of the night.

Today I was walking past a house where there were men at work. Despite walking on the other side of the road, I heard laughter and they were all leering at me. I could not be bothered to confront them, all I could do was give them the middle finger. I’ve just had enough.

At the moment, I feel like giving up. I feel completely powerless and unable to defend myself.

I am going to join a slimming club to try to lose weight because Im sick of being judged simply because Im curvy and not a twig. Maybe then people will start accepting me instead of critisising me.

– Clarice

Location: North Cornelly, Wales, UK

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.

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Tina Fey talks street harassment

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Sometimes I feel like I can’t escape from street harassment! Not the actual act of harassment, which, thankfully I am experiencing less than I ever have since my pre-puberty years, but rather, I can’t seem to escape thinking, hearing, and reading about it. But overall, that’s a good thing because it means more people are writing and speaking out about it (as twitter, facebook, hollaback sites, and google feeds show me daily).

I often can’t even escape street harassment during day-to-day conversations because I’m now so associated with street harassment that when people see me, many share their stories! It’s almost comical when people start off by saying, “Holly, I experienced street harassment yesterday and it made me think of you”!

Often at my talks, we eventually get kicked out of rooms because so many people are talking, sharing stories, and thinking aloud about street harassment. After all, it’s not very often we have the time and place to talk about it. And that is great! When I speak at conferences or conventions, the conversations often carry on longer than that.

For example, earlier this week, I had a killer travel schedule as I gave talks about street harassment in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in the space of five days. For major stress relief and to try to briefly sight see, I went running outside each day, except one day when I opted to use a hotel’s gym to ride a bicycle. I had given a talk about street harassment to around 100 women the afternoon before and this was my one day in five that I was not giving a talk. Someone who had been to my talk was also at the gym at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday and confessed to being a chatty morning person and immediately jumped into telling me her street harassment stories and musings on the topic. Repeat, at 6:30 a.m. when I wanted some stress relief! But of course I talked to her. I can’t turn down an opportunity that comes up.

But, sometimes I need a break and actively pursue one.

Upon my (brief) return home this past Wednesday, I was happy to see that a copy of Tina Fey‘s new book Bossypants had arrived. I’d been saving onto an Amazon gift card since January and I was glad I had waited to use it for this purchase. I love Fey and 30 Rock is one of the few shows I watch each week with my partner. He and I decided to read it together and prepared for some good chuckles (and yes, there are plenty!).

When we first started it, he sped read ahead a bit and then loudly announced, “Look at the next page — street harassment!”

Sigh. Of course, street harassment.

In her chapter titled Growing Up and Liking It, there’s the subheading When Did You First Know You Were a Woman? Fey describes how when she was writing the movie Mean Girls, she attended a workshop taught by Rosalind Wiseman as part of her research (Wisemand wrote Queen Bees and Wannabees, the book Mean Girls was based on).

I’m going to let Fey describe what happened next (see pages 14-15 of her book):

“[Rosalind] did this particular exercise in a hotel ballroom in Washington, DC, with about two hundred grown women, asking them to write down the moment they first “knew they were a woman.” Meaning, “When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?” We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, and then in larger groups. The groups of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ‘I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, ‘Lick me!’ ‘I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, ‘Nice ass.’ There were pretty much zero examples like ‘I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.’ It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they’ve crossed into puberty? If so, it’s working.

I experienced car creepery at thirteen….I was walking home alone from school and I was wearing a dress. A dude drove by and yelled, ‘Nice tits.’ Embarassed and enraged, I screamed after him, ‘Suck my dick.’ Sure, it didn’t make any sense, but at least I didn’t hold in my anger.”

And so here I am, all fired up again over street harassment instead of being able to just laugh and find stress relief from reading Fey’s funny book.

As usual, I’m outraged. Why are we okay with a culture where grown men yelling sexually explicit things to teenage girls and overall treating them with disrespect is how we learn we are women?! I’m not okay with that and I know you are not either. So we’ve got to keep taking action and keep speaking out. It’s our right and it makes us powerful.

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