This is an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Marty Langelan for Fem2pt0. Read the full interview on their website.
I spent years feeling annoyed, angry, and scared by gender-based street harassment. In 2007, when I began research for a master’s thesis on the topic, I was very grateful to find the book Back Off: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers. This ground-breaking book was authored by Marty Langelan, the former president of the DC Rape Crisis Center, an economist, activist, and martial artist. I read every page of it, relieved that there was both an explanation for my experiences and a toolkit of tactics for what to do about it.
This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Back Off, and Langelan is still tackling all kinds of harassment. She’s working with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to design sexual harassment trainings this fall for more than 3,000 frontline bus and subway employees.
Because her work – and her book – is so essential to the on-going efforts to address sexual harassment in workplaces, schools, and public spaces worldwide, I was thrilled when she agreed to an interview.
Q. Holly Kearl (HK): Why did you write your book?
Marty Langelan (ML): Harassment was “normal” back then. It was happening everywhere. If you managed to sidestep the sleazy professors, bosses, and coaches, you ran into slimy landlords, creeps in the park, gropers on the bus, and gangs of sexual bullies on the corner.
They did it anytime they felt like it. They did it for a sexual turn-on, or an ego-boosting sense of power, or just because they liked humiliating women. They did it because they could.
I was teaching self-defense for women and kids at the DC Rape Crisis Center, and doing research on how to stop sexual assault. My friends at Women against Rape in Columbus, Ohio, were doing the same.
We learned that harassment is more than just creepy. Some harassers were “rape-testing” women, using sexual harassment to select victims for assault, looking for women who seemed unlikely to fight back. It might start as a simple verbal intrusion, but any harasser, any time, could decide to escalate: Follow you, grab you, and shove you up against a wall. It made me so angry.
Being silent did nothing to stop the aggressors. Cussing-crazy-lady tirades just turned into violence.
We needed to change the predator-prey dynamics. We needed tactics that would make women safer (stop the harasser fast, without escalation) and create social change (make him think twice about ever trying it again). We needed verbal self-defense.
So we began to challenge harassers with nonviolent confrontation. Instead of scurrying away like scared rabbits, we began to walk up to the harassers, try some carefully structured verbal judo, and analyze the results. We tested and fine-tuned tactics to find out what worked. (We had plenty of opportunities for testing – we were all getting harassed, all the time.)
By 1986 we declared Washington DC a “Hassle-Free Zone,” with public speak-outs, leaflets and posters, and training sessions all over town. We took back neighborhood parks and street corners with ethical, direct, nonviolent action.
When Anita Hill testified at the Clarence Thomas hearing, I got furious all over again. Women everywhere talked about it — people were shocked to find out that almost every single woman they knew had been harassed. But most women still felt defeated. They still just quit the job, dropped out of school, stopped using that park or bus stop, and crossed the street to avoid harassers. I hate it when people feel helpless.
So I sent out a nationwide survey, asking, “Have you ever successfully stopped a harasser? Tell us what you did, what worked.” That survey flew across the country. Responses flooded in, first from the U.S., then from around the world.
And when I analyzed the results, all the successful tactics had the same core structure. They were all versions of the same verbal judo we were using in DC – fast, clear, principled nonviolent action that changed the power dynamics and stopped harassers cold. We had an entire toolkit of tactics that worked.
It was a turning point. I don’t know whether we can stop rape in our lifetime, but we sure can stop harassers. I wrote Back Off so that no harasser could ever make us feel helpless again.
