Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Video: “No mas puercas costumbres” (No more degrading customs)

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Watch the video “No more degrading customs” (No mas puercas costumbres)

Film creator Paulina Romero shared the following about it with me for the SSH blog.

“Since my teenage years, I suffered street harassment in the streets of my country, Mexico. “No more degrading customs” came out from my personal need to denounce it. It’s a shortcut that exposes the patriarchal violence experienced by women in the streets of Mexico, aiming to help eliminate it.”

Paulina studied International Affairs, focusing in women studies and feminism. During her college years, she got involved in activism for women’s rights. Today, she is producing “El Arbol de Las Manzanas”, her first feature documentary about migrant women in New York City.

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UK: Street harassment exhibition on Sept. 16

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My name is Jennifer and I’m currently finishing my Masters in Fashion at Kingston University – London. My final project is called “It’s not my fault. It’s yours” and it is an intervention to contemporary sexual harassment through fashion.

What I have developed is an outfit with a panic alarm, siren and gps SOS button. They also have reflective fabric in some parts as another way for the women using them to get help. The main goal with this project is to criticise the point we came, regarding sexual harassment and abuse, that we have to protect ourselves even with our clothes. It’s a criticism to contemporary mentality and behaviour regarding women and the clothes they wear.

The final exhibition of my work will be during my university’s fashion show as part of London Fashion Week on the 16th of September.

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Racial profiling of Black Women

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Image via MIC

Via MIC:

“African-American actress Danièle Watts claims she was “handcuffed and detained” by police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department at CBS’s Studio City production facility on Thursday after allegedly being mistaken for a prostitute….

Sadly, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2008, a Galveston, Texas couple sued three police officers who arrested and beat their 12-year-old daughter after mistaking her for a prostitute. And at the 2011 Netroots Nation convention in Minneapolis, Minn., Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill Politics asked a panel of African-American women to raise their hands if they had ever been mistaken for a prostitute. Everyone’s hands went up.”

This is UNACCEPTABLE. And even if she were a sex worker, LAPD should never have treated her this way.

Related, anecdotally, in my 7+ years of street harassment activism, I’ve found that Black women are more likely to be propositioned and called out to as if they are sex workers by street harassers compared with any other race of women. A student’s study about street harassment in Egypt a few years ago found the same thing to be true in Egypt — dark skinned women were more likely to be assumed to be and treated as prostitutes.

Related:

* Monica Jones was arrested basically for being a transgender woman of color walking down the street.

* A Sudanese woman featured on Humans of New York talked about being solicited “all the time”

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