Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Two Weeks to Go!

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Raise your hand if you’re energized to be joining 150+ groups in 32 countries (so far…) during the fifth annual International Anti-Street Harassment Week, April 12-18!

With just two weeks to go, here are a few important updates.

Global Night of Action, April 17
Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS), an internationally-recognized art project that confronts gender-based street harassment, is organizing an international wheat pasting night on April 17. Those interested in participating can visit the website to request downloadable PDF’s (in their preferred language) of STWTS posters.

“The idea behind the wheat pasting night is to create a night of solidarity. People from all all over can participate in a night of action, knowing that hundreds of people in different parts of the world are doing the same thing.”
– STWTS Founder Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Tell Us What You’re Doing!
We want to know what you’re doing! Please either complete this form or e-mail Britnae with details, BPurdy@stopstreetharassment.org.

These are examples of the exciting actions that will be taking place:

* Groups in Korea and Nicaragua will be releasing data they’ve collected on street harassment.
* A club at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh will be distributing fliers and speaking to taxi drivers, rickshaw drivers, and shop keepers throughout the week, as well as chalking the sidewalks.
* Safecity will be hosting workshops and street plays in India.
* The Women Against Street Harassment Movement in Zimbabwe will be speaking at schools, handing out fliers, hanging posters, appearing on radio and television, and inviting people to sign petitions and survey.
* Girls Speak has developed shareable images and posters encouraging bystander intervention.

Press Release Template
Download a Word doc press release template you can customize to alert local media to your actions for the week.

Write about It!
Starting April 1st, we’re hosting a “Write In.” We’ll be posting daily writing prompts and providing tips for getting your writing about street harassment published. We hope you will consider submitting a piece to your local newspaper, magazines, college publication, or blogs. Op-eds, poetry, research, news articles, and personal columns are all welcome. You can also submit a piece for publication on the SSH Blog! More info.

Twitter Chats: 
Join in the twitter chats (#EndSH)!

April 12, 4-5 p.m. IST. Safecity and SEEW will talk about reporting harassment.

April 13, 2- 3 p.m. EDT, SSH, Paremos el Acoso Callejero in Peru and Imprint Movement in Egypt will discuss practical solutions to street harassment.

April 14, ALL DAY, various groups across the globe will tweet information throughout the day about street harassment and related issues in their region.

April 15, 1-2 p.m. EDT, Everyday Feminism will discuss what communities can do about street harassment.

April 16, Time TBD, Pixel Project and Breakthrough will discuss cultural differences in harassment and responses to it.

April 17, 1-2 p.m. EDT, virtual chapter of NOW will host a chat on a TBD topic.

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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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