Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Archives for March 2015

ʺRun home to daddy b****”

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My high school is located in the upper downtown area of Indianapolis, Indiana. When I was a sophomore I was walking down the city street from my school to a coffee shop about five blocks away to wait for my father to come pick me up. It was the middle of July and hot outside, so the streets weren’t too busy. As I waited at a stop light to cross the street, a man started to approach me walking fast. As he got up next to me he shoved a tube filled with liquid to my face asking ʺHey beautiful, do you know a man that smells like this?ʺ Terrified that it was laced with drugs or something I held my breath and stepped away. I told him as politely as I could muster, ʺNo, I’m sorry I do not.ʺ

He said, ʺYou didn’t even smell it.ʺ And shoved it to my face again.

This time I began to walk quickly across the street as my light changed, where he then began to follow me, and started to become angry. I asked him to leave me alone, and then I was confronted with angry yells like, ʺSpoiled mother f****** racist princessʺ ʺRun home to daddy b****.ʺ

I spotted police cars parked by a CVS and quickly made my way in there, where he finally walked away. I waited in there for about 30 minutes, then ran the rest of my way to the coffee shop. Later when I told a trusted older cousin about the incident, she told me things like that wouldn’t happen to me if I didn’t wear the clothes I wear. I was 15, In a baggy t-shirt and cut off shorts, in 90 degree weather. I’m 18 now, and this event still haunts me, along with others.

#StopStreetHarassment

Optional: What’s one way you think we can make public places safer for everyone?

If you see it, say something. If the actual attack isn’t horrifying enough, its being surrounded by people who didn’t say a thing.

– Melissa

Location: Indianapolis, Indiana

Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea

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New Resource for Runners in Philadelphia

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Credit: Samantha Varnum

Alon Abrahamson is the creator of the Philadelphia-based running website Run Philly and created an “Incident Report” page that allows runners to log in incidents of harassment, physical assault, muggings and more that happen while they are running.

Via Runner’s World:

““These incidents must happen every single day, multiple times per day,” Abramson told Runner’s World Newswire. “I want to provide a mechanism to capture that. In doing so, we would actually have material to give to decision-makers and people with actual power to makes some changes like fixing bad intersections or putting out more patrols. It’s a bit of a civic experiment.”

After crowdsourcing data through this fall, Abramson will create a heatmap, which will ideally reveal hotspots of trouble for runners in Philadelphia.”

H/T Michelle Hamilton

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Kenyan program improves boys’ attitudes towards girls

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We need this kind of programming in every country, every school!

Via Reuters:

“The schoolboy watched as a man tried to remove the nappy of a little girl he was dragging along a Nairobi riverbank, suspecting that he was going to rape her. Having been trained to defend girls against sexual assault, the boy called other young men to help him confront the man and rescue the child.

“It would have been fatal,” said Collins Omondi, who taught the boy as part of a program to stamp out violence against women and girls in Nairobi slums. “If this man would have assaulted this kid, he would have thrown her inside the river.”

Omondi teaches a program called ‘Your Moment of Truth’, run by the charity Ujamaa Africa which encourages adolescent boys to stand up against violence toward women.

The training is “highly effective” in improving attitudes toward women and increasing the likelihood of successful intervention, researchers from Stanford University, University of Nairobi and United States International University-Africa said. The training increased boys’ successful interventions when witnessing physical or sexual assault by 185 percent, from 26 to 74 percent, according to their study to be published later this year in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.Interventions in verbal harassment also increased, and rape by boyfriends and friends of girls in schools where ‘Your Moment of Truth’ was taught dropped by 20 percent, from 61 to 49 percent, the researchers said.”

H/t Soraya Chemaly

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Iowa City Addresses Street Harassment

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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.

We ended the night by each making signs that either had something we could envision ourselves saying to harassers or general pro-respect messages.

Way to go Ending Street Harassment group and WRAC for addressing this important issue.

“Practice the golden rule. Stop street harassment!”

“Don’t be an ass. Don’t street harass!”

“I am not yours to claim. Stop Street Harassment”

“Don’t harass me!”

“I don’t go outside for you to look or comment on! I have places to go and people to meet!”

“Yeah, Don’t.”

“Did I ask you to do that?”

“And if I want to take a walk alone at night you will not make me feel unsafe.”

 

 

“Not today. Respect my space and don’t harass me!”

“Respect Our Community Humanity. Stop Street Harassment”

“Don’t harass me! It’s not okay”

“Respect yourself by giving me some respect.”

“RUDE!”

“Don’t harass me”
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Update on Detained Chinese Activists

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As I’ve shared here before, on March 6 and 7, public security officials detained five feminist activists in China who planned to distribute stickers and leaflets on March 8, International Women’s Day, to raise awareness about the problem of sexual harassment on public transportation (something SSH does and advocates others do in their communities). Nearly 3 weeks later, they are still being detained.

The New York Times reported yesterday that “Lawyers for the detainees, who were held on suspicion of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble,’ say their clients are being maltreated in jail. The police took away the eyeglasses of Ms. Wei and Ms. Zheng. Ms. Wang was hospitalized with heart problems after interrogations continuing far into the night. Ms. Wu has been denied medication for her hepatitis.” (More on their health conditions.) The article also talks about how people speaking out against their detention within China are facing backlash.

On Monday I joined Allie of SlutWalk DC held a protest at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC. Here are stories about it by Voice of America and RFA Cantonese

Protests have also been held outside the UN in New York and in New Delhi, Hong Kong, and Seoul, Korea. UN Ambassadors and EU representatives have called for their release. Unfortunately, yesterday the BBC reported that “China has rejected calls from several foreign governments to free five women’s rights activists who have spent nearly three weeks in detention.”

For the latest updates on the five women, follow the Free Chinese Feminists Facebook page.

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