Soliciting Minneapolis Street Harassment Stories
I’m sharing this for our ally Cards Against Harassment:
“Have you ever experienced street harassment in Minnesota? A Minneapolis-based activist is gathering stories (however brief, however general) to help inform upcoming anti-harassment initiatives in Minneapolis.
If you can, please take a minute and either in the comments on this post, or in an email to cardsagainstharassment@gmail.com, describe your experience(s) with street harassment in or around Minneapolis. If you want to share details of your experiences, please do, but your post or email does not need to be specific, dramatic, or seem notable to you; a simple “this has happened to me and here is how it affected my me or my behavior” will suffice. The preliminary goal is to simply gather samples of experiences, and ideally some detail on street harassment’s impact on people who live, work, or have visited Minneapolis.
If you do share details, please don’t include narrative concerning perceptions concerning the economic status or racial or ethnic identity of your harasser, or coded language accomplishing the same. The goal is to help increase respect, not prejudice.”
Street Harassment Curriculum
Here’s a new resource from Hollaback.
Via their Facebook page:
“Today we released our new anti-street harassment curriculum that we have been working hard on! HOLLA 101 features 19 lesson plans, videos, role-play exercises and more. The curriculum also features our vlog series, With Love and Revolution. To view the curriculum visit the link!”
Video: Push My Button
Here’s a new video about street harassment by Heather Arnett, her latest in a series called the Cat Call Choir. She writes that the series is “a somewhat sardonic, slightly scornful, but non-violent, songful response to street harassment.”
Push My Button from Heather Arnett on Vimeo.
“In this week’s Cat Call Choir experiment we added the Staples Easy Button with “sing” written on it to encourage people to stick around to listen for a verse and perhaps engage in a conversation about street harassment.
What do you think? Should we just sing to people so there’s no option to get away from unwanted attention very much like when women are harassed on the streets, in parks, on trains and at work? Or is there value in encouraging the conversation?”
New Efforts in Finland, India, and New Zealand
Here are three new efforts about street harassment, one led by Finnish police and two others led by students in India and New Zealand.
Finland (via Sputnik News, “Finnish Cops Can Now Write Tickets for Sexual Harassment”):
![Image via HBL](https://stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Finnish-Police-300x150.jpg)
“According to Hufvudstadsbladet newspaper, police in Finland have recently been given the power to issue fines for perceived sexual harassment.
‘We’ve attempted to find a quick solution to the problem. The existing threshold for sexual harassment complaints is pretty high, but perhaps we’ll be able to decrease it if police will be able to act immediately,’ Helsinki police chief Lasse Aapio said.
A patrol officer doesn’t require any special permission other than the victim’s statement in order to fine a suspect, as sexual harassment is usually pretty obvious, he added.
‘The fines would also help to more easily identify perpetrators, which can sometimes be quite problematic if a crime was reported too late. A police officer issuing a fine may also immediately suggest a victim to officially press charges,’ Aapio pointed out.”
India (via the Time of India, “Project by school kids focuses on issues of equality”):
“The classroom is dark. Plastic hands and broken bottles protruding from large stands brush your body as you walk down a winding path covered with yoga mats. Expressionless faces stuck on the mats stare at you while the cat-calling adds to the discomfort. It is similar to the harassment a woman faces when she walks through a dimly lit street. And that’s the whole aim of the exercise. For the walk through the maze ends with a short, informative slide presentation on street harassment.
The maze and presentation were part of a creative project done by class 7 and 8 students of Kids Central, Kotturpuram, to create awareness among parents about street harassment by making them ‘encounter’ it as they walked through the maze.”
New Zealand (via the New Zealand Herald, “Reign of abuse on Otago streets”):
‘Unacceptable and insidious” harassment by Dunedin students has hit breaking point and the University of Otago needs to take action, residents say.
Otago bioethics PhD candidate Emma Tumilty co-signed a letter with 10 other people who live and work in the student precinct, calling on vice-chancellor Harlene Hayne to act…
Former Otago student Jessie-Lee Robertson said she had suffered verbal abuse – including an incident last week. She was in her car with her dog on Albany St when a van load of young people pulled up next to her. “[They] opened the sliding door of their van and said, ‘If that dog wasn’t in your car, I’d rape you’.”
The most shocking part, she said, was that it happened while she was in her car. She had already begun avoiding the main streets of “studentville” for fear of abuse, but did not expect it on the road.
Mikayla Cahill, a third-year student, had also been harassed in the student quarter several times, most recently last week, Orientation Week.
Detective Senior Sergeant Kallum Croudis said there was a consistent stream of “complaints about criminal behaviour of a sexual nature” in Dunedin, and a “small spike” of those kinds of complaints during Orientation Week.
Police took the complaints seriously, especially after learning “some very poignant lessons about sexual violence”…
Professor Hayne acknowledged the importance of educating students about harassment. She responded to Mrs Tumilty, saying she had “no tolerance whatsoever for this kind of behaviour”.
The university, she wrote, was working on developing “two educational programmes for Otago students” – one for students in residential colleges that would begin next semester, and another to start next year as part of the Orientation education programme.”