Iowa City Addresses Street Harassment | Stop Street Harassment

Compared to most cities, people in Iowa City are doing a lot to address street harassment. Since 2006 there have been anti-harassment bus PSAs . The University of Iowa’s Women’s Resource Action Center (WRAC) has held events and awareness-raising demonstrations about street harassment and their staff are currently working with bars on how to address harassment in their venues. And last fall Stella Hart formed the Ending Street Harassment in Iowa City group which has held a public forum/discussion and conducted a bystander training. It also has an online discussion space.

Stella’s group and WRAC hosted me at WRAC’s building last evening for a lecture and informal Q&A about street harassment. For anyone who doubts that harassment is a problem in smaller towns or the Midwest, it is. They had stories to tell, just as people do in communities all over the world. Many fraternity men are offenders. Several people shared how they had tried to talk to the police about specific incidents and had gotten no where. I brought copies of the Iowa section of our Know Your Rights toolkit so they can use it to show police which laws DO address street harassment…but by the end of the night they were ready to plan action without the police.

Today they began putting their plan in place by creating a communications chain so that if anyone sees a harasser at the same spot (e.g. not passing by in a car but hanging out on a street corner or fraternity house front porch), they can rally people together to come out and tell the harasser to stop. Collective action. They also talked about doing sidewalk chalking on football game days because that is when street harassment is particularly bad…they shared how they feel too unsafe to hold a march, rally or distribute materials on those days given that the harassers are mostly drunk and adrenalized.But they decided to try out chalking next fall and see how that goes. They also discussed asking the incoming new university president to sign a contact promising to address street harassment.