By: Tilly Grove, London, UK, SSH Correspondent
I remember being jealous of my friend who confessed to being wolf-whistled by the waste collectors she passed on her way to school, regardless of the fact that it clearly distressed her and she was lodging a complaint with the council.
We were fourteen or fifteen years old then. I had already swallowed whole the idea that street harassment wasn’t just something that we had to accept, but it was something that we should appreciate, something that we should want, something that we should envy other victims for. At the same time, these men were harassing a girl in her school uniform. Whether they were behaving in the way they did because they found her sexually attractive, because they wished to intimidate her, or both, they could be fairly safe in the assumption that they were dealing with a child. Clearly, it didn’t stop them. Maybe it encouraged them.
As women, we are acutely aware that street harassment is an accepted part of our lives. In many ways, though, it is more than that; it is the rite of passage we must undertake to be considered women. The moment a girl receives her first catcall, her first wolf-whistle or her first grope, she can consider herself well on the way to adulthood – no matter how unwanted the action was, and no matter how uncomfortable it made her. Such is the brainwashing of our society, she feels that she should be grateful, because it’s a compliment.
If she dares to pluck up the courage and tell someone – a parent, guardian, or teacher, perhaps – she may find her concerns brushed off on the basis that, “It’s just something women have to put up with,” so she needs to get used to it. If she tells her friends, she might find her complaints rejected because, “You love it really!” They’ve been taught to view it as a compliment, too.
The entitlement that men perceive themselves to have over women, their bodies and their lives knows no boundaries, age-related or otherwise. When I tweeted out a request for girls and women to share their earliest memories of street harassment, the majority recalled that it started before they were even teenagers. The eleven-year-old catcalled by builders on her way to get ice-cream, the thirteen-year-old beeped and hollered at by men in cars for wearing shorts, and the sixteen year old who can’t leave the house for even five minutes in a skirt without a man passing comment, all learned that the hard way.
Men began to intimidate them and reduce them to sex objects the moment they hit puberty. That’s the initiation into adulthood.
One thing above all else sticks out as being universal in the stories I heard, though: from the moment these women had their first experience of childhood street harassment, that harassment immediately became a constant part of their lives, and remains so to this day. They graduated into womanhood.
Tilly is studying for a BA in War Studies at King’s College London, where she is writing her dissertation on the effect that perceptions of gender have on the roles which women adopt in conflict. You can follow her on Tumblr and Twitter, @tillyjean_.
