Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Searching for videos of girls being groped

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I am deeply disturbed by some of the referring terms my blog statistics say people are using when they happen upon my blog. Some recent ones include:

  • “interactive breast grope game”
  • “any girls who want to f*ck a stranger?”
  • “pictures of how to wolf whistle”

Literally every day several people come to my blog via search terms that are some variation of “dirty school girl” and “groping girls video” because of posts like these ones which talk about men groping women in public and this story about a man asking to take a picture of a young woman in a “dirty schoolgirl outfit”. I take it they are disappointed when they get here since I speak out against these problems.

I try to block out how many predators there are who are making money off child porn and misogynistic, racist, homophobic, size-ist adult porn and how many more people are spending their time and money consuming it. But each time I check my stats I’m reminded that they’re out there.

Not that the messed up predators are probably still reading this post (which some of them will find when I tag it with “groping” and “dirty school girl outfit”), but I still want to say to them:

Looking at pictures and videos of girls being groped and sexualized in school outfits is disgusting and you are a predator who clearly has no respect for girls or women. Shame on you for contributing to a culture that thinks it’s okay to make money from girls’/women’s humiliation and a culture that says it’s entertainment when boys/men assault girls/women and harass them at home, school, work, and on the street.

That is all.

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New method for reporting street harassers

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In Egypt, individuals are developing a HarassMap to allow women to report harassers via SMS messaging. It will map the location of the occurrence and help track where harassment is occurring and its frequency.

My good friends at HollaBackNYC and RightRides (who also are the lead coordinators for New Yorkers for Safe Transit) are taking this idea new places. This is their plan:

“We want to create an online map where women can ‘Hollaback!’ directly from their cell phones. Quick, 140 character stories can be submitted through three easy portals: a) text it, b) tweet it, and c) submit it through a ‘Hollaback’ mobile phone app. Once submitted, harassment and assault data will be mapped and later analyzed in an annual ‘State of Our Streets’ report which will be sent to the police, public officials, and the media. Automatic email alerts noting real-time harassment will also be available. Local citizens and policy makers can sign up for alerts on incidences in their own communities, or review our HARASSmap to see harassment hot-spots. Once we launch in New York City, we want to take it worldwide.”

As you may imagine, implementing this project takes money. They’ve applied for funding and they now need YOUR HELP to vote for their project!

For almost a year now I’ve been advocating (mostly silently though – lol) for a system that allows women to easily report the harassment and its location so I am thrilled to see them working to make it a reality. There are a lot of deterrents to reporting harassers now (including the fact that in most places you can only report people who are threatening or touching you) and it’s making the pervasiveness of the problem of gender-based street harassment largely invisible to mainstream society and to policy and lawmakers. This tool could change everything and make it easier to report harassers and it also could  show us where there are the most harassers so we can target those areas to end it.

Please go vote for the mapping/reporting tool – it’s really cool and has the potential to be a gamechanger in the fight against street harassment!!

Please also spread the word to your networks. Cut and paste this to your facebook, twitter, Myspace, and LinkedIn pages:
Vote for Hollaback 2.0 http://bit.ly/14Egc2 then repost to end street harassment!

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Chemical Castration for Sex Criminals?

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Manuel da Cruz kidnapped Marie-Christine Hodeau while she was jogging near a forest, 30 miles south of Paris, France, last week. She was able to call the police from the trunk of the car and gave them the make and registration of the vehicle. Cruz killed her before police could help (she actually escaped at one point when he stopped to change cars but he caught her again). The articles I read did not say if she was sexually assaulted too; it does not seem like it. The information she provided led to his arrest and the police recovered her body in the forest.

This is the extra kicker: Cruz, a father of four, had been sentenced to 11 years in prison for the kidnap and rape of a 13-year-old girl in early 2000s, but he was released seven years later (and he returned to the same place where his victim lives)!

Rightly so, this case is generating an outcry against the French judicial system.

It’s also generating pressure for the “hardening of a law introduced in 2005 which allows sexual offenders to volunteer for so-called ‘chemical castration’ – the use of anti-hormone treatment to reduce or destroy the sexual appetite.” This is already used in Germany, Belgium, and Denmark.

Last week, the justice minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, said that “she would propose a draft law by the end of this month to toughen the existing legislation. She said, however, that chemical castration would remain ‘voluntary.'”

I know very little about this topic, but I’ve found out that chemical castration is reversible and is used to diminish or switch off the libido/sex drive, but that only lasts as long as the treatment. This legislation and mindset suggests that rapists rape because of an uncontrollable sex drive – but aren’t issues like power and control more at play? And if so, will chemical castration really help?

What do you know/think?

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"I'll bet next time he buys marshmallows"

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Today I’ve been writing my street harassment book chapter on ways women can respond to harassers in the moment – if they feel safe enough to and wish to – and success stories illustrating those ways.  The stories come from my informal survey and from stories submitted to this blog and other anti-street harassment blogs. The Street Harassment Project has a whole depository of great stories and I got a nice laugh from the stories from one contributor in particular. (I don’t condone violence or insulting harassers and I’m not including either of these stories in my book, but it’s hard not to feel some vindication at the outcomes of the stories when too often men get away with this kind of crap)

“Construction sites are full of men who hoot & holler, make rude gestures, etc. They feel safe in doing so, because they’re behind fences, on scaffolds, and with thier buddies. Cowards!

I had to walk past one such site at least twice a day. I’d heard comments, but none of these men had ever actually addressed me. Until a specific afternoon, when one of these guys hollered, “Hey lady, come up here and suck my dick!”

I’d had enough. I have a smart mouth anyway, and before I even thought about it I yelled back “Well maybe I would if I could FIND it under that fat gut of yours!” Jeez. Even I was embarrassed, but his buddies on the scaffolding nearly fell off laughing, and the women near me cheered.

From then on, when I walked past that site, all these guys would dare holler at me was “Hi lady! How ya doin’? Nice day huh?” with big grins on thier faces. And I never heard another lewd commect from ANY of them to ANYONE the whole rest of that remodel. I felt like Wonder Woman!

….

A friend of mine worked nights at 7-Eleven and a creepy little guy browsed around the store until he was the only customer, then brought a can of creamed corn to the counter. She turned aside a bit to ring it up, and when she turned back, he’d taken his willie out and laid it on the counter. She panicked, and did the first thing that came to mind…she smashed it as hard as she could with that can of creamed corn. Split it down the middle. She called 911, totally freaked, and one of the policemen said to her, as they hauled this pervert away in the ambulance, ‘You did a good thing here. Don’t feel badly, he had it coming. I’ll bet next time, he buys marshmallows!'”

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“I’ll bet next time he buys marshmallows”

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Today I’ve been writing my street harassment book chapter on ways women can respond to harassers in the moment – if they feel safe enough to and wish to – and success stories illustrating those ways.  The stories come from my informal survey and from stories submitted to this blog and other anti-street harassment blogs. The Street Harassment Project has a whole depository of great stories and I got a nice laugh from the stories from one contributor in particular. (I don’t condone violence or insulting harassers and I’m not including either of these stories in my book, but it’s hard not to feel some vindication at the outcomes of the stories when too often men get away with this kind of crap)

“Construction sites are full of men who hoot & holler, make rude gestures, etc. They feel safe in doing so, because they’re behind fences, on scaffolds, and with thier buddies. Cowards!

I had to walk past one such site at least twice a day. I’d heard comments, but none of these men had ever actually addressed me. Until a specific afternoon, when one of these guys hollered, “Hey lady, come up here and suck my dick!”

I’d had enough. I have a smart mouth anyway, and before I even thought about it I yelled back “Well maybe I would if I could FIND it under that fat gut of yours!” Jeez. Even I was embarrassed, but his buddies on the scaffolding nearly fell off laughing, and the women near me cheered.

From then on, when I walked past that site, all these guys would dare holler at me was “Hi lady! How ya doin’? Nice day huh?” with big grins on thier faces. And I never heard another lewd commect from ANY of them to ANYONE the whole rest of that remodel. I felt like Wonder Woman!

….

A friend of mine worked nights at 7-Eleven and a creepy little guy browsed around the store until he was the only customer, then brought a can of creamed corn to the counter. She turned aside a bit to ring it up, and when she turned back, he’d taken his willie out and laid it on the counter. She panicked, and did the first thing that came to mind…she smashed it as hard as she could with that can of creamed corn. Split it down the middle. She called 911, totally freaked, and one of the policemen said to her, as they hauled this pervert away in the ambulance, ‘You did a good thing here. Don’t feel badly, he had it coming. I’ll bet next time, he buys marshmallows!'”

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