Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Anti-Street Harassment Week in Yemen

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In Yemen, the Safe Streets campaign launched a Hotline for street harassment reports, to coincide with International Anti-Street Harassment Week.

Director Ghaidaa Alabsi writes: “The aim of the Hotline is to monitor and document the crimes of sexual harassment on the electronic map of the campaign to deliver the suffering of those who were subjected to sexual harassment to the public opinion and put pressure on the decision-makers to implement a mechanism to reduce the phenomenon of sexual harassment in the streets of Yemen. The victim can report by sending SMS to the following number 772150052 and explaining the location where it happened.”

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Police Harassment of Transgender Individuals

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Transgender individuals face some of the most vicious and persistent forms of street harassment, including from the police.

Via New York Times:

“Last week, Mitchyll Mora, a youth leader at a group called Streetwise and Safe told me about an experience he had last spring, on his way to a poetry reading on the Lower East Side. Dressed in a style he called non-gender-conforming — makeup, boots, long earrings — he was stopped and searched by the police for no reason he could understand. The police made him throw his hands up against the wall, invoked a gay slur and grabbed his buttocks, he said. “I should have tried to file a report, but it’s hard to feel empowered in this kind of situation,” he said.

Mr. Mora did recount this story in testimony to the City Council last October in support of the Community Safety Act, proposed legislation that would, among other things, require police officers to explain themselves to those they have stopped and provide them with a document, including the officer’s name and information on how to file a complaint, if necessary, at the conclusion of a police encounter…

Johanna Vasquez, who at age 16 came from El Salvador, where, born male, she always felt the instinct to be female and suffered terrible abuse and prejudice because of it, she told me. Two years ago, she said, she was stopped by police officers at 2 a.m. outside a nightclub on Roosevelt Avenue, waiting for a taxi. She pleaded guilty to charges that she was loitering with intent to sell herself, feeling that she had no other choice, she said, but she denies having any involvement in prostitution. She had been similarly accused in Texas, she told me, a matter that resulted in her deportation years earlier.

Last year, the Police Department responded positively to requests from advocates that it revise its Patrol Guide to ensure that transgender men and women receive more sensitive treatment. But Ms. Vasquez continues to feel constrained. She told me tearfully, “I don’t go out at night, and I fear that even if I go to the pharmacy I’ll get arrested.”

RightRides shared the story on their Facebook page along with this additional information:

“During our community forum in Jackson Heights last summer, we learned from community members that NYPD police have been profiling LGBTQ folks, especially Transgender folks, in the neighborhood for quite some time. Community members shared with us stories of being discriminated against by police, being harassed by police and being wrongly incarcerated for prostitution. The struggle continues to make our streets safer and that means calling out NYPD when they are the ones doing the harassing. #policeharassment”

Amen. The streets should be safe for EVERYONE. Police should be our allies, not our harassers and tormentors. It’s time for change.

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New Anti-Harassment Transit Ads in Philadelphia

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After a lot of hard work and fundraising, Hollaback! Philly is proud to launch a series of anti-harassment ads on the public transportation system this week, timed to coincide with International Anti-Street Harassment Week! Congratulations to them.

Hollaback! Philly’s Rochelle Keyhan and Anna Kegleranswered a few questions for me about their great ad campaign. Learn more on their website and share your views about the issue and the ads.

1. Stop Street Harassment (SSH): Where did the inspiration for the subway ad campaign and the messaging on the ads come from?

Rochelle: Our tourist bureau here, VisitPhilly.com, has an “Love, Philadelphia, XOXO” series. One of the ads was this huge billboard that explicitly street harassed everyone who walked past it, commenting “I like the way you move it move it”. We asked them to take it down, and they refused while adamantly defending the advertisement as not offensive. That was the first push we needed to realize that if we want the conversation to reflect our reality, we need to get out there and force our voices to be heard.

Anna: One ad outlines various catch phrases men said to a group of high school students we did a workshop with for buildOn’s Alternative Spring Break in 2012 (in partnership with Nuala Cabral). They created a video PSA from their experiences, and the stories they recounted largely inspired that advertisement. The other ads we developed through many conversations within Hollaback Philly and through input with other activists. I did a lot of research on framing and messaging to create them as conversation starters that would encourage even the non-believers to think twice about street harassment. We tried to enter the conversation from various perspectives to engage the largest number of people, so there are three larger advertisements, and three smaller, simpler advertisements, all aiming to get people thinking about the issue.

2. SSH: What impact do you how the ads will have in Philadelphia?

Anna: All we’re really trying to do is start a conversation, and get people to start associating the term “street harassment” with “problem” and “solvable”, instead of “inevitable” and “acceptable”.

Rochelle: We hope people will use the ads to start conversations about their experiences with street harassment. I am most hopeful that men will use the ads to start conversations with women in their lives who may not share with them the harassment they experience every week.

Anna: Overall, if we can increase understanding and get a conversation going about ways we can work together to create a safer street culture, I will consider these successful!

3. SSH: What advice or strategies would you suggest to someone else who wants to get an ad campaign on their local public transportation system?

Rochelle: Don’t take no for an answer. There’s no money in the budget for PSAs? Raise your own money. Your cause isn’t important enough? Don’t talk to that person again until you’ve gotten the ads up, then invite them to reconsider that opinion. I’m not going to lie though, this was a LOT of work. From raising enough money, to designing the ads, to figuring out messaging and what they should say, to negotiating the contract – we only succeeded because it was something we really believed needed to be done, and no one else was doing it so it was our time to stand up and act.

Anna and Rochelle

4. SSH: Anything else?

Anna: In creating and designing the ads, we obviously could have done a Philly-specific set of ads. But, we are just one branch of a robust international organization, so we specifically designed these ads to be scalable so that we can share them with other Hollaback branches.

Rochelle: We don’t want the conversation to end here. This is only the beginning.

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