Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Archives for March 2015

What does progress for transwomen look like?

By

*Trigger warning*

The points raised in the Guardian article “If transwomen have to hide to be safe, what does progress look like?” are really important to consider, especially on International Women’s Day: How can we help create a culture/society where everyone is safe to express their gender identify?

“Many transwomen now believe that they have more to fear than ever: this year looks to possibly be one of the most violent on record towards transgender women in North America, as there are already eight confirmed homicides of transgender women – a majority identifying as women of color – and it’s only March…

‘We will hear women talk about just the harassment on the [Chicago Transit Authority], but I think we have to keep in mind that broader context…That a tiny bit of verbal violence … nobody knows where that goes to when there are so many women ending up dead.’

‘I get it’, Danielle Love, the peer-lead coordinator for TLC, chimed in. ‘I have people literally come up to me and say: ‘You’re a fucking fag.’ And I am just sitting on the train going to work and someone feels they can say that.’

And it happens so much so that many have stopped reporting this type of violence among many other forms.”

On what we need to do:

“Maria Pahl, a cisgender women who is the staff attorney for TLC, finds storytelling can be a tactic for change, but it’s only one side of the coin.

“I think as a broader society we need to do a better job not just listening to stories that are palatable”, she said, referring to [Janet] Mock and [Laverne] Cox.

She thinks that it’s the unsavory stories of the most oppressed people’s everyday lives, not just the few representative of that group in the public eye, that need to be heard and embraced, like, for instance, stories of needing to engage in survival sex work to make ends meet like we see many transgender women having to do…

All the women I spoke to at TLC agreed with this statement, all of them transgender women besides Pahl. And they all felt this is what has been missing with this “tipping point” for their community.

For them, stories are not only important because of who is telling them, but also who is listening to them. And that is what is needed now, more than ever, for transgender women: that all of us finally listen to their stories.

Share

CSW and International Women’s Day 2015

By

Happy International Women’s Day! This is an important opportunity each year for raising awareness about issue that particularly affect women, such as street harassment.

As the author of this Time magazine article notes, we’ve made a lot of progress in the past few decades regarding the education of girls, women’s access to water, women’s leadership, and maternal mortality. BUT there are still gaps in these areas and HUGE gaps in areas like gender-based violence. So as always, there is a lot more work to do.

The day coincides with the start of UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York City and I am en route to attend the NGO CSW Consultation Day today. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN Women, will be one of the speakers and panelists from around the world will talk about the UN/international women’s movement from 1975-1995, the 1995 Beijing conference on women’s rights, what’s happened in the 20 years since then, and what comes next.

Starting at UN headquarters, an International Women’s Day march took place, concluding at Times Square around 4:30 p.m.

International Women's Day March
International Women’s Day March

Tomorrow I have various meetings — including at the UN — and also will attend the No Ceilings Full Participation Report release. From the event press release:

“The report is the culmination of a year-long, global data aggregation effort by the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with The Economist Intelligence Unit, UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center and Fathom Information Design. The report identifies the significant gains women and girls have made – and the gaps that still remain – since the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, when Secretary Clinton called on the international community to ensure “women’s rights are human rights.” Benchmarking process since that landmark event, No Ceilings is making the data open and accessible, and is pairing the report with an interactive, shareable collection of data visualizations. The data visualizations will highlight key findings from the data through interactive stories, as well as allow users the ability to explore the data on their own.”

Speakers will include Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, Melinda Gates, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia, Her Excellency Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, President of the Republic of Croatia, Malala Yousafzai, and Sheryl WuDunn.

I will tweet during (or soon after) the events (@hkearl) and blog about them on Tuesday, so stay tuned. 

CSW will last about two weeks and the parallel events hosted by NGOs are free and open to the public if you’re in the area and want to attend.

Share

Why researchers should focus on street harassment

By

Our board member Dr. Laura S. Logan, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hastings College, wrote “Street Harassment: Current and Promising Avenues for Researchers and Activists” for the current issue of the academic journal Sociology Compass. In it she makes the case for why researchers in particular need to focus on street harassment. A short exceprt follows, here is the full article.

“…researchers should focus on street harassment for several reasons…because it is on a continuum of violence against and oppression of femininities and the people associated with femininities. It is also on a continuum of violence against people of color, particularly when we consider institutional racism and the risks of criminalization associated with being in public space if one is, for instance, a Black man or woman. Street harassment is part of a larger culture that values in deed if not always in word men’s sexually predatory behaviors, sexual assault against women and children, women’s subordination and marginalization in politics, the second shift and the wage gap, victim blaming, the murder of transgender women, bashing gay men, repelling girls from math and science before they even get to high school, increasingly limited access to reproductive health care, racial profiling, and more. Research indicates that street harassment limits women’s presence in public space – where the work of politics and social change is most likely to take place – and that women think about harassment, fear it, and plan for it, even in its absence (Gardner 1995). Street harassment is more than a nuisance, more than a threat, more even that the violence that sometimes accompanies it….

Street harassment conveys the message that harassers are entitled to own public space and in a sense to control and violate the people in that space. The message to targets of street harassment is that they should hide, be afraid, pay attention to what potential street harassers want them to do, and wear and say and be. Street harassment robs people of safety, agency, power, and opportunity. Increasingly, activists are writing about and rallying together to address street harassment. It is time that more researchers joined them.”

Share

Afghan men promote women’s rights, Indian men harass girls

By

Via Huffington Post

Via HuffPost:

“A group of Afghan men marched through the capital, Kabul, on Thursday to draw attention to women’s rights by donning head-to-toe burqas that for many people worldwide have come to symbolize the suppression of women.

The hardline Taliban forced women to wear burqas in public during their rule in the 1990s and concern is growing in Afghanistan and among its allies that gains for women made since the 2001 U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban are at risk. The men marched under a leaden sky, with the bright blue burqas falling over their heads down to muddy sneakers and boots.

The demonstrators, associated with a group called Afghan Peace Volunteers, said they organized the march ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8.”

Meanwhile, in India, 8 young men on bikes harassed 20 schoolgirls who were riding a bus on their way home from their Board exams. The bus drivers stood up for the girls and the young men escalated their actions, injuring the bus drivers. One girl was also injured when the young men pelted the bus with rocks.

Parents of the girls registered complaints and two of the young men have been found and arrested.

Share