By: Taylor Kuether, Minnesota, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
My experience with street harassment has happened almost exclusively during my college years. I go to a mid-size state school in northwestern Wisconsin, and the harassment seems to follow a pattern: The number of catcalls rises and falls with the temperatures. Every spring, the first day I deem it warm enough to wear shorts, I can count on someone making a loud comment about it, usually from across the campus mall. If I decide to go on my first bike ride of the season, I know I’m going to hear men shouting at me from passing cars. And once the height of summer hits, if a friend and I want to go floating (tubing down the Chippewa River, which runs right through our campus), we should expect to hear lewd comments aimed at us as we carry our inner tubes to the riverfront.
Being yelled at as I try to live my life doesn’t make me feel comfortable or safe. It isn’t something anyone should leave the house expecting or calculate into their day. But in my experience, at least before this summer, the comments were just that – comments.
This summer, I’m living in Minneapolis – a much larger city than my college town – for an internship. Minneapolis is home to the University of Minnesota, a Big 10 school with an enrollment of about 50,000. And on any given weekend night, you can find many of those students in “Dinkytown,” the city’s college bar district.
A few weeks ago, a friend and I went out for a drink in Dinkytown. Just 20 minutes into our outing, a college-aged man came up to us on the sidewalk and tried to put his arm around me, asking us where we were headed. I was surprised, but I shrugged it off as my friend and I kept walking, wordlessly, heading to the next bar.
Once inside, we tried to go upstairs, only to find a second college-aged male who took it upon himself to drunkenly block us from doing so. He stood squarely in front of me, slurring pickup lines at me and making it impossible to ascend the stairs. Annoyed, I grabbed his shoulder and moved him out of our way.
At our last stop of the night, a burrito place where we were hoping to grab some food before heading home, a third college-aged man came up behind my friend, pressed himself against her, and asked her what she was up to. It was the third time in a span of maybe two hours that someone had come up to us and physically entered our space. This wasn’t the street harassment I was used to – words thrown from afar with the space between my harasser and me acting as a buffer, a safety net. This was much more aggressive, much more invasive.
I’ve speculated as to why there is such a difference: Is it the size of the school? Is it the presence of Greek life (my school doesn’t have it; at U of M it’s huge)? Is it the size of the city the school is in?
I’ve always assumed college-aged men think they can get away with harassment for three reasons: one, their new found freedom and lack of supervision, two, their age and lack of maturity, and three, the anonymity afforded by the sheer size of a college campus.
At a big school, your own stupid actions can disappear into the much larger sea of stupid actions. At a big school, you can “get away” with more – after all, if you’re not the only one doing it, it must not be wrong, right?
What have your own experiences been with street harassment on college campuses? Did the size or location of the school impact the harassment you experienced or witnessed? Leave a response on the blog or tweet at me at @taylorkuether.
Taylor Kuether is a senior journalism student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconsin. She has previously written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, worked as a reporter at her city’s daily newspaper, The Leader-Telegram, and its arts and culture publication, VolumeOne, hosted a local-music centered radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio, and worked as Editor-in-Chief at her student newspaper, where she enjoyed writing biting, slightly rant-y columns about feminist issues.
