Sarah Chang, Guest Contributor
I returned home from work on a late afternoon, parked my car on the street, and as I was getting out of my car, a man walking by and said, “Will you suck my dick? as he passed. The words didn’t even register until a few seconds later. He kept walking, and after I realized what he said, I looked in his direction to see who he was. I suddenly realized this man had actually made “suck my dick” comments to me previously, both times on the street by my residence. I felt angry that I was unsafe in my own neighborhood, and paranoid that perhaps this man was targeting me and knew where I lived.
I emailed the residents in my building to inform my neighbors about this person. With my description of the man and incident, another woman in my building said he had also said inappropriate things to her and her sister, and that they had filed a police report. This made me feel better, knowing he wasn’t targeting just me, but obviously it was equally unfortunate that this man felt entitled to indiscriminately harass women all the time. I followed suit and went to the police station to file a report.
At the station, the police took my report but said they could do nothing because I didn’t know the man’s name and could only provide a general physical description. I asked them what I should do the next time it happened. The officer said to call 911, and if possible, follow the man from a safe distance and wait for the police to arrive.
A few months later, I was walking by this same police station and the man that harassed me actually walked out of the police station. I waited for him to leave before walking into the station, letting the officer there know that he was the man I filed the police report on. The officer said that he knew who the man was, said that he was harmless, and said that he’d talk to his parole officer. The officer didn’t seem to take me very seriously.
I then contacted my neighbor to tell her that I had identified the man and asked if she would come down to the police station with me to corroborate and press the issue. My neighbor didn’t want to do much more other than to leave it be and just avoid the man whenever she ran into him.
I am an Asian American woman, and I experience street harassment all the time. Sometimes it’s just the leering, or just the “hey baby”s or the explicit sexual requests like the example above. But more often than not, it turns race-related: “Love me longtime?”, “Sucky sucky, five dollar”, and the “ni-haos” in my face that sound like meowing. The race-related street harassment is a one-two punch because it thinly veils hatred behind sexual subjugation. It’s common and it happens frequently enough that I’m habitually on edge when I walk outside by myself.
My natural defense mechanism against street harassment and unwanted attention is to have a scowl on my face. This scowling defense mechanism affects my day-to-day public interactions. A recent example of this is that my husband, an Asian American man, will often recount all the people he encounters when he is out taking the dog for a walk. These encounters however, consist of friendly hellos to him (and the dog) and remarks about how cute our dog is. Hardly anyone ever greets or tells me how cute my dog is when I take her for a walk. I attribute this difference to my scowl and general “don’t bother me” attitude, which I’m not even aware of. Walking the dog while male and walking the dog while female shows how street harassment makes a deep impact on seemingly trivial activities.
Speak up about and against street harassment. It’s not ok and I’m still going to report it to the police. I’d really like to enjoy a walk my dog sans scowl, the way that it’s supposed to be.
Sarah Chang is a middle and high school math teacher in the Boston Public Schools. She resides in Boston’s South End and is passionate about education and social justice.
