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Egypt: Comic Stories Against Harassment

October 29, 2015 By HKearl

Imprint Movement's new campaign. October 2015

Our friends at Imprint Movement, in collaboration with Al-Moltqa for Consulting and Training, launched a new anti-harassment campaign in Cario’s subways yesterday.

Their press release says:

“The campaign aims aims to communicate to subway passengers and security personnel how sexual harassment affects the entire Egyptian society and not only the girl or the woman who gets sexually harassed.

Imprint has chosen a new approach to draw attention, “Comic Stories”. The comic stories address the challenges that women face created by sexual harassment, the victim blaming culture, to what extend do women and girls feel safe in public space, reactions of the public, its reflection on her personal and professional life and how that effects the entire society. Many posters will be put up to show how the crime of sexual harassment increases when the public don’t interfere to support the girl/woman who get sexually harassed.
The comic story will be circulating around the Cairo subway, It’s Now at Al-Shohadaa, Then it will take place at Mohamed Naguib then Al-Sadat and finally Al-Attaba  metro stations. Twelve posters will be put up at Helwan University station, Manshyet Al Sadr Station and Cairo university station as these station are considered to have the most activity and gets huge amount of people daily.

The launching of “What will you do?” campaign is 24th of October, 2015 and ends on the 15th of February 2016.”

Congratulations to them on this innovative campaign!

Learn more about the campaign and see photos here.

Via the Guardian: An illustration depicting a young woman’s experience on a minibus. Illustration: Ahmed Nahby/Mada Masr/Imprint
Via the Guardian: An illustration depicting a young woman’s experience on a minibus. Illustration: Ahmed Nahby/Mada Masr/Imprint

UPDATE: The Guardian has a great feature article about their campaign. Here is an excerpt:

“Imprint, the organisation behind the campaign, has been raising awareness of sexual harassment through events ranging from one-on-one conversations to workshops, co-founder Abdel Fattah al-Sharkawy explained.

He said participants – both male and female – often found they weren’t aware of what constitutes sexual harassment, and rarely related the term to their own day-to-day experiences.

‘We wanted to make that link’ through the comic campaign, he said.

The group decided to work with comics because ‘they’re catchy and colourful’, drawing people of all ages in to explore the stories they tell, Sharkawy added.

Another image from the series shows male passengers on a minibus reacting to the young woman.

‘This woman can be an influential person in your life,’ the illustration reads. ‘Sexual harassment doesn’t harm her alone, it harms us all.’

They differ from typical public service announcements because they rely on storytelling instead of propagandistic slogans, so they ‘make you think and form an opinion,’ he said.”

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Filed Under: News stories, Resources, street harassment Tagged With: Egypt, imprint movement, transit campaign

USA: City Council Member Tackles Street Harassment

October 28, 2015 By HKearl

NYC Hearing on Street Harassment, Oct. 2010
NYC Hearing on Street Harassment, Oct. 2010

Five years ago this week, NY City Council Member Julissa Ferreras called the first-ever hearing on street harassment. My first book was used in the briefing papers and I was the first to testify. More than a dozen of us, ranging in age from 14 to 52 and representing many races and genders, gave testimonies about street harassment and how it impacts our lives. The hearing was covered by scores of outlets and CM Ferreras has remained committed to the issue in various ways ever since.

One of our former volunteers Raquel Reichard works for Latina.com and did a great interview with CM Ferreras this week. Here is an excerpt, but the whole interview is worth a read!

CM Ferreras and Holly Kearl in Feb. 2011
CM Ferreras and Holly Kearl in Feb. 2011

“In 2010, when you were chair of the committee on women’s issues, you organized the first-ever city council hearing on street harassment. Why was it important for you to do this?

As young girls, we are taught to ignore this behavior, but then we are told to not put up with domestic violence when we are grown up. How does that make sense? So, for me, it was a great opportunity to share with women that their situation mattered.

I had just gotten elected in November of 2009, so I felt I had the opportunity to use my authority as a council member to have a hearing on this topic. Seventy-five women came up to testify. Women took time off from their day, sat through testimonies and talked about street harassment, because it’s an important conversation.

How can governments make streets safer for women?

For starters, it’s important to create a space where we can hear women speak about the problem. When I held the hearing, I heard stories about girls and women being harassed when walking up the stairs to elevated trains. If you stand underneath the stairs, you can look up the girls’ skirts. Maybe we need to rethink the way we build train stations and the stairs, and that becomes a governmental issue. Also, here in New York, we deal with Daylight Savings Time, meaning it gets dark when we still have whole days ahead of us. And we know, from studies, that women feel unsafe in dark settings. So we need to work on improving lighting in neighborhoods, and we need to work with small businesses that might leave their lights on throughout the night. I’ve done this in the past, and bodegas are willing to leave their lights lit if it’s for the safety of their community

But also, we need to get police departments to take this issue seriously, to listen to women and take their reports.”

Read more.

The city council hearing is featured in my book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World (Praeger 2015) and I will be talking about it, among other issues, at my NYC book event at Bluestockings on Nov. 5.

Also, if you’re in Washington, DC, you can participate in a city council roundtable on Dec. 3, organized by Collective Action for Safe Spaces. Info. 

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Filed Under: street harassment Tagged With: city council hearing, Julissa Ferreras

Costa Rica: A Protest, a Law, and a Campaign Targeting Men

October 26, 2015 By HKearl

A boy holds a sign reading “no more machismo” during the “Gracias a Gerardo” march in downtown San José. Lindsay Fendt/The Tico Times
A boy holds a sign reading “no more machismo” during the “Gracias a Gerardo” march in downtown San José. Lindsay Fendt/The Tico Times

This has been a busy month in Costa Rica.

Last week there was a march against street harassment.

Via the Tico Times:

“More than 100 people wearing white and carrying signs marched in the Costa Rican capital San José on Sunday morning to protest against sexual harassment in public places, or street harassment. They also marched in solidarity with the family of Gerardo Cruz, a young man who was stabbed shortly after publicly shaming another man for lewd behavior in the street…

Marchers said they came out for several reasons, ranging from support for the Cruz family to making a stand against sexual harassment and machista culture.

“I came because I’m a mother and I want to support a better world for my daughter and show respect for all the women in the country,” said María Gutiérrez, a 33-year-old judicial branch worker who pushed a stroller with her baby.

Rebeca Pérez, a 33-year-old makeup artist, was there wearing white with her son, Aaron. “I’m here because I want to show my son that we [women] deserve respect, and to set a good example for him, not the negative ones we see every day.”

Pérez said the first time she got harassed in the street was in front of her home when she was 9 years old. A man approached her and started asking her questions about sexual development, she said.

“I hope there’s a change,” she said, carrying a sign that read, “If we teach our children, street harassment will end.”

This month, the women’s rights group Colectivo Acción Respeto Costa Rica and other organizations launched an initiative to draft and submit a bill for criminalizing catcalls and other forms of sexual harassment in public spaces.

Via the Tico Times:

“The groups announced their proposal during a press conference at the Legislative Assembly where lawmakers from the ruling Citizen Action Party (PAC), National Liberation Party (PLN) and Broad Front Party (FA) offered support to promote the adoption of the draft. Among its main goals the initiative asks for the inclusion of street harassment as an offense in the country’s Penal Code.

Alejandra Arburola Cabrera, a spokeswoman with the Colectivo, told The Tico Times that they started working on the initiative months ago, however the recent stabbing of Gerardo Cruz prompted them to speed up the discussion and include lawmakers and citizens.

Cruz was stabbed twice one day after he posted on his Facebook profile a video he shot of another man recording video with his cellphone up the skirt of a female pedestrian in downtown San José. Cruz has since undergone three surgeries and currently remains at Calderón Guardia hospital.

Arburola said Cruz’s case is a reflection of the reality that haunts women from the moment they leave their houses everyday. “We are seen as objects, with no rights and submitted to constant violence. This needs to stop as soon as possible,” she said.

Tuesday’s meeting also allowed the groups’ leaders to call on all citizens to participate in the drafting of the bill, following a number of priorities identified by the group in recent months.

Among them, they believe the bill should clearly define street harassment based on gender or sexual orientation as a criminal offense punishable with prison sentences…

This isn’t the first time Costa Rica considers penalizing street harassment. In 2005, then-Costa Rica legislator Gloria Valerín Rodríguez (Social Christian Unity Party) introduced a bill that would have added street harassment against women to Costa Rica’s penal code.

Valerín proposed a fine of 30 to 50 days minimum wage for perpetrators. The bill was unsuccessful.”

There is also a new social media campaign in Costa Rico to engage men in the issue. The Ombudsman’s office, the National Institute for Women and NGO “El acoso callejero no es cosa de hombre” (Street sexual harrasement is not a man’s thing) launched “videos and messages from artists, athletes, journalists and other personalities saying that real men don’t catcall, make obscene gestures, take pictures or videos on the street.”

Here is one of them.

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Filed Under: male perspective, News stories, street harassment

Check Out Our New Look!

October 25, 2015 By HKearl

We have a new look! Visit www.StopStreetHarassment.org.Thank you to everyone who donated in late 2014 to make it possible.

Thank you also to our website designer Sarah of Sarah Marie Lacy Studios. I highly recommend her for a website upgrade or launch!

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Filed Under: SSH programs, street harassment Tagged With: website redesign

Ireland: A Letter Challenging Verbal Abuse

October 25, 2015 By HKearl

Jenny Stanley. Image via The Independent
Jenny Stanley. Image via The Independent

Last week, Jenny Stanley wrote a powerful open letter about street harassment for The Irish Times. In it she describes the many times she faced street harassment as she simply commuted home from work at night. Her closing is heartbreaking:

“I walked home. I opened the door and sat in my kitchen. I cried. I was so very, very tired. I knew then that just because I was home it did not mean it was all over. I too am exhausted, not only for myself but for those who have had and will have similar experiences, and the innumerable amount of men who do value and respect women and anyone who believes that gender should not influence a person’s right to be viewed as an equal in the eyes of another.”

Her letter has been covered by several outlets, including Cosmo, MTV, Elite Daily, Bustle, and the Huffington Post.

I joined Jenny and Tom Meagher of the White Ribbon Project on an episode of The Women’s Podcast for The Irish Times. I was asked to talk about the “right way” to respond to street harassers and shared how there is no right way. We have to do whatever we can to feel safe and get out of a frustrating, annoying, upsetting and sometimes really scary situation. And then we can do what we can to speak out and be part of the cultural shift so that street harassment is no longer acceptable or commonplace.

Tom spoke about men’s role and how to reach boys on the issue, which is so, so important.

I applaud Jenny for taking a stand — even if she didn’t feel able at the time the harassment happened, she is clearly having an impact now.

 

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Filed Under: Advice, News stories, Stories, street harassment Tagged With: Jenny stanley, speaking out

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