I’ve been experiencing street harassment since the age of twelve, but when I started college it suddenly became something that happened to me several times a week – even though my college was nearly 75% female. I was harassed both on-campus and in neighboring residential areas. I was harassed walking to and from class, the library, friends apartments, downtown on a Friday night…while it became a “normal” thing that I learned to more or less deal with, it never stopped making me feel uncomfortable.
One incident stands out in particular. It was a warm night, still early in the fall semester of my senior year. It was 10pm on a Monday night, and I was walking back from an on-campus club meeting to my off-campus apartment.
“Hey! Hey you!”
I ignored the calls, assuming they weren’t for me. Though there were few people around, I was on a well-lit main path on campus where I had always felt safe.
“Girl with the ponytail!”
Ok, that was definitely meant for me. Someone was yelling at me. Someone I didn’t know. I started to walk a little faster.
“Hey! Girls shouldn’t be walking out here alone. Where are you going? Let me walk you to your apartment. Where you live? I could walk you right up to your door, you know.”
He was following me. I was walking straight back to my empty apartment, and this stranger was following me. My thoughts started racing, and I pulled out my cell phone.
“Why you grabbing your phone?” my harasser yelled, now angry. “Who you calling? Girl, this is a private party!”
My heart immediately started pounding, my vision went blurry with fear. I made a split-second decision to run into the nearest academic building, where I hide in furthest stall of the women’s bathroom, feet up on the toilet seat, praying he wouldn’t follow me in.
I called my boyfriend. Luckily he was nearby and able to run over and get me. I went back to his apartment rather than mine, and once my hands and voice stopped shaking I decided to call campus police.
“I’m fine now,” I told the dispatcher when she picked up, giving the best description of the event that I could. “But I wanted to let you know that a strange man just tried to follow me back from my apartment, and I’m worried he might do the same thing to someone else tonight.”
“Well, you should have called while it was happening,” she replied curtly. “There’s nothing we can do now.”
I thanked her, for some reason, and numbly hung up, feeling a dull anger inside of me. Call while it was happening? I tried. It had only made the situation worse.
While the police dispatcher’s reply made sense, logically, it also displayed a basic misunderstanding of how to deal with victims of sexual harassment. I had been followed and threatened. I had been forced to hide in a bathroom out of fear. And when, out of concern for my fellow classmates, I reported it to the police, I was basically scolded for not acting sooner. I felt like I had done something wrong, rather than having been wronged. And for the rest of the year I refused to walk back from nighttime club meetings without my boyfriend accompanying me.
Colleges, we need a little help here. What do we, as students, do when we are threatened on campus? When our activities and movements are restricted due to gender-based harassment? When we begin to fear walking on our own campuses? When we are made to feel ashamed for having been harassed in the first place?
College is a time when we learn to embrace our own mobility and freedom. Harassment and the threat of sexual assault more than puts a damper on that, but there doesn’t seem to be much we can do. So colleges, I’m imploring you: help us learn what to report and how to report. Show us you’ll listen, and show us you’ll care. Remember back to the time when you were first learning to be free, yet constantly being told by society to be scared, and choose compassion rather than curtness. Teach us to be safe; but more importantly, teach us all not to put others in danger.
Britnae Purdy, Anti-Street Harassment Week Online Manager
