Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
Liza Donnelly is a prolific cartoonist. Her latest cartoon, published on Medium’s The Nib today, is about street harassment, a topic she has addressed before. She gave me permission to share it here —
Thanks for using your talents to raise awareness about street harassment, Liza!
My earliest interaction of catcalling came when I was 12 years old. My friend was gorgeous and physically mature for her age, and told me she got catcalled a lot. Once, we were walking downtown together, and a 30-ish man yelled from a car, ʺHey baby, you lookin gooood today,” equipped with kissing noises. My (keep in mind, 12 year old) friend just frowned, looked at her shoes, and sighed. I was dumbfounded that someone would actually say that, and thinking back, it’s quite disgusting.
– Anonymous
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea
Trigger Warning…Upsetting news out of Mexico.
“According to the National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition of 43 groups that document the crime, six women are assassinated every day.
Yet only 24 percent of the 3,892 femicides the group identified in 2012 and 2013 were investigated by authorities. And only 1.6 percent led to sentencing.
“Femicides are a pandemic in Mexico,” asserts Ana Güezmes, the local representative of United Nations Women, the agency devoted to gender issues.
The word “feminicidio” first entered the vernacular in the 1990s, with explosive rates of disappearances and murders of women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez. In fact, more women have been killed in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital city of the same name. The number doubled from 2005 to 2011, when the current national president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was governor of the state. Today he has pledged to combat drug violence overall but has not spoken out against femicides.
Impunity is the main motor of the gender crime, Güezmes says, as well as social norms that allow the violence to be ignored or accepted as a normal part of life. She describes femicides as the extreme end of a society where 63 percent of women have suffered abuse by male hands. She estimates that maybe a third or half of the cases involved sexual partners. The balance — abductions, rapes and discarding the bodies like garbage — are probably linked to the generalized drug violence that is tearing Mexico apart.”
If you want to learn more about this on-going and horrific tragedy, I recommend the book The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border.
I’m so excited that our Safe Public Spaces Champion awardee Muriel Bowser is MAYOR of Washington, DC!
“”It’s my charge to make [D.C.] greener, healthier, safer and more fiscally stable than we find it today,” she said.
Formerly D.C.’s Ward 4 councilmember, Bowser is now just the second woman to lead the District. Early in her inaugural remarks, she thanked the female mayors of other major cities, saying, “Today, because of you, I am one too.”
It’s in large part thanks to her that the Washington Metropolitan Area has an anti-harassment transit campaign. In 2012 when I was part of a group organized by Collective Action for Safe Spaces (I was one of their board members at the time) that testified about harassment before the DC city council and the all male WMATA leadership responded by saying harassment wasn’t a problem, Bowser told them “as a woman I feel differently” and told them to do something. And they did. #WomenLeaders
Two quick news hits ~
“’Harassment is a culture,’ says Khadra, a 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Jordan in Amman. Physical, verbal and cyber, harassment happens in the streets, in parks, on public transportation, and at schools and universities.
Despite its prevalence, official research and statistics on street harassment in Jordan do not exist, according to Asma Khader, secretary general of the Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW). Manal Sweidan, head of the gender statistics division at the Jordanian Department of Statistics, confirmed that the department did “not have … any official data regarding sexual harassment.” Khader estimated offhand that 80 percent of women face harassment, and “it is increasing.” The lack of formal data makes quantifying and addressing the issue difficult.”
“In February the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea published its report. Its findings included large-scale sexual abuses, mostly directed at women, across all sectors of society.
“Witnesses have testified that violence against women is not limited to the home, and that it is common to see women being beaten and sexually assaulted in public,” the report officially said.
Regardless of who you speak to about North Korean women – researchers, activists, journalists, academics – one thing is clear: North Korean women are subject to abuse on a monumentally large scale.
This is not a new phenomenon in North Korea; rather this long-standing history of silent persecution of women’s sexuality is based on the strong foundations of a patriarchal system where women are expected to overcome any challenge at work or home with absolute loyalty towards the Great Leader, as mothers of the nation.
The social expectation and pressure exerted on these women, particularly in the post-famine period where the private economy has seen women enter into new realms of society, has created new problems and threats both in the home and workplace.”