By Nikoletta Gjoni, Maryland, USA, SSH Correspondent
My mom always says that the more choices someone is offered, the harder it is to decide—whatever that decision may be about. In a strange way, that could very well apply to street harassment as well. Just follow me for a minute here. The term street harassment sounds very straightforward and is obvious as to what it refers to. It doesn’t leave much room for interpretation as to what would be considered street harassment vs. what wouldn’t be. However in today’s day and age, it’s becoming grayer, trickier, and harder to confine the definition of street harassment and where and how it can be encountered.
In my first article, I wrote about the reasons for and ramifications of using technology in public in an effort to thwart harassment. I focused on the use of ear buds, cell phones, and laptops as a means to deter men from communicating with women, but a recent article featured in the New York Times made me consider how technology itself encourages harassment on the Internet that can or cannot manifest into harassment encountered on the street.
In “Victims Push Laws to End Online Revenge Posts,” new light is shed on the ever growing problem with “revenge porn”—sites that cater to vindictive exes, overwhelmingly male exes, who post nude photos of ex-girlfriends/ex-wives/ex-lovers, sometimes with phone numbers, home addresses, and employment addresses attached to them.
Aside from the very obvious fact that this is intrusive and formulaically vengeful, it can spark, and in fact already has sparked, a slew of problems for the women whose pictures are posted—loss of jobs, alienation from friends and/or family, and not least of all, exposure to stalkers.
Ms. Taschinger, the twenty-three-year-old profiled in the article whose ex-boyfriend shared a dozen or so nude photos of hers on the Internet, states that on many occasions upon coming home from work, she would spot a man sitting in a car outside of her house. She eventually quit her job at a restaurant. Others have also experienced getting approached and hassled in public spaces.
“Sometimes I want to get into a fetal position and cry,” says Taschinger.
The Women’s Center states that 1 in 20 women will be stalked in their lifetime; 79% of women know their stalkers, 50% of women have been in a relationship with the stalker, and 80% of those relationships were abusive.
While it’s important to note that yes, these women did willingly give their then boyfriends/husbands/lovers their photographs, it is immeasurably more important to recognize that they did not agree to having them shared with the Internet world, a fact that seems to fall through the cracks of empathy and land right into the gutter of blame.
While street harassment is recognized as an unwelcome sexual advance, either verbal or physical, that occurs in real life while out on the street, I start to wonder whether or not that could and should include the Internet. Through the use of cell phones, laptops, and tablets we are exposed to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram—blog sites, porn sites, private sites, and public sites—free sites and sites that charge.
For a lot of us, ‘real life’ weaves on and off the Internet and everything we post becomes a reflection of our every day lives. In a world so highly charged and high speed where the sense of privacy diminishes a little more with each new piece of technology that is unveiled and every new app that is downloaded, I wonder if street harassment can be stretched out to encompass and define the pixelated paths of every WWW site we may encounter, particularly when they in turn create the kind of street harassment we typically classify as such.
Someone who isn’t brave enough to holler on the street may take the route of anonymity the Internet oftentimes provides. Someone who feels jilted can take to the Internet to post private photos without the photographed knowing.
Choices. And though they always existed in the simple form of you can either be the person who harasses or you can be the person who doesn’t, it has now become more complicated than that. You can holler; you can click and share; you can click and forward; you can click and view. Who is guilty of harassing? Who is guilty of perpetuating, and is perpetuating on the Internet the same as perpetuating on the street?
And if not—well, why not?
Nikoletta Gjoni graduated from UMBC in 2009 with a B.A. in English Literature. After graduation, she did almost four years of freelance work in a D.C. broadcast station, in addition to having worked as a literacy and linguistics assessor for pre-k classrooms in D.C.’s charter schools. To get to know her better, she can be tracked on both her creative blog and Twitter, @nikigjoni.
