By Nikoletta Gjoni, Maryland, USA, SSH Correspondent
The many times that I’ve gotten on the metro recently I’ve thought about an article I read a few weeks ago in The New York Times, How Not to Be Alone. The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, writes about the diminishment of daily human interaction due to the ever-rising use of technology and its tendency to isolate us. What I found to be both intriguing and significant in the article was Foer writing about a recent occurrence on the streets of Brooklyn:
A girl, maybe 15 years old, was sitting on the bench opposite me, crying into her phone…I was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could respect the boundaries between us. Intervening might make her feel worse, or be inappropriate… an affluent neighborhood at the beginning of the day is not the same as a dangerous one as night is falling. And I was me, and not someone else.
The significance of what Foer writes (with absolute knowingness) is that 1) an older man approaching a young girl on the street would be perceived as shady to most bystanders, and 2) that he confuses an ‘affluent’ neighborhood for a safe one; street harassment doesn’t discriminate according to zip code. The very real concern that he would come off as an intrusive and possibly threatening man to a teenaged girl is strong enough for him to want to keep his nose in his contacts list and completely ignore the situation. Foer doesn’t tell us what he ultimately decides to do, though he admits that “there’s a lot of human computing to be done.”
Though street harassment is by no means a new problem for women, it is perhaps more widely acknowledged today than it may have been in years past. Like countless of other women all over the world, I have had my fair share of unwanted gazes, comments, and contact. The only time I’ve had backup is when I’ve been out with friends. On any other occasion of simply walking to and from work or trying to look for a street name, help is almost never readily available.
It is disheartening to think that even though people can spot and disapprove of street harassment, few will say anything against the perpetrator. So when I stumbled upon an Avon Foundation tweet regarding a bystander behavior training program for sexual harassment, it reminded me of the work being made out there by different organizations to create awareness of when someone is being verbally or physically assaulted, and to step in when one can. It’s a reminder that when one is being attacked in a public space, it should be the duty of others around that person to jump in and strike down the harassment taking place. One would hope that if enough people partake in bystander intervention, it would eventually become the normalized behavior. Sometimes all it takes is a quick acknowledgment to let the victim know that she has not slipped through the cracks in the middle of a crowd.
So what do I do to deter unwanted advances? Precisely what Foer continues to write about in his article. I pull out my phone, plug in my earbuds, and blast my music. My girlfriends and I joke about how it’s a hassle whenever we forget our phones/ipods/ipads/kindles/earbuds. We joke about how we try to avoid eye contact in a crowded metro car – just in case! – because we have all had that one experience, that one time when we were approached just to be told that we look sad/angry/bored.
I sometimes wonder if it’s the healthiest fix to the problem. I know that in the process of trying to avoid unsavory people, you may miss out on conversing with the interesting ones. Foer recognized that his intentions may have come off as creepy or impure, and while I appreciate and also sympathize with his sensitivity to the matter, I would actually encourage him and other men to step up and speak up when their incentive is to be a good Samaritan. Being prejudged as a harasser is as sad as the harassment problem itself, and it’s something I consciously try to remind myself of whenever I am out in public.
Nikoletta Gjoni graduated from UMBC in 2009 with a B.A. in English Literature. After graduation, she did almost four years of freelance work in a D.C. broadcast station, in addition to having worked as a literacy and linguistics assessor for pre-k classrooms in D.C.’s charter schools. To get to know her better, she can be tracked on both her creative blog and Twitter, @nikigjoni.
