Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

We need equal access to public spaces now!

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On Saturday night around 2 a.m., after dinner and card games with some friends, I exited the metro in Arlington and began my very routine ten-minute walk home. The temperature was below freezing and I was bundled uncomfortably in my coat, trying my hardest to make it home as quickly as possible. Moments after beginning my trek, two men walked toward me.

One of them sort of walked past me – and stopped a few feet away – while the other man came up to me and started to talk. And from the way he began his interactions, I was fairly certain that they wanted something sexual. I’ve been approached on the street for this reason before and the timing seemed right. And so did the conversation. He asked me what I was doing and where I was going and, when I said I was going home, he wanted to know where I lived. I motioned up the hill in the obvious direction that I was walking and tried to get away. I was sandwiched between him and a building.

Then the conversation’s tone changed. He pointed to my North Face jacket and said I must have a lot of money. I’m not sure what kind of rich white boy he thought I was, but the comment was almost laughable. But he said it again. And again I said I wasn’t rich. In a sort of startling way he asked what my name was and, after repeating the question several times and me saying it didn’t matter, I escaped up the hill and didn’t look back. Home was only a few blocks away, and thankfully they didn’t follow me. I couldn’t tell if the other man was annoyed that his friend was doing it or if he was there to offer support in some way. A lot was unclear from my interaction with them.

I didn’t know what they wanted. I thought they were going to ask to go home with me, or ask me to go home with them, but then I thought they wanted to rob me. And then, when he kept asking for my name, I thought he might have wanted something sexual again. I also didn’t know why they targeted me. Did they want someone shorter than them? If they wanted to sleep with me, then possibly. If they wanted to rob me well, then, probably. Did my race affect their decision to pursue me? And how important was it that they perceived me to be male? I wanted to be active in my dismissal of them, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure how to respond because I didn’t know what I was responding to.

And as scary as it was, and as I try now, still, to conceptualize exactly what happened to me, it’s raised some interesting questions in my mind about how I sort of binarize male-on-male street harassment. I think about it in a very plain way. The perpetrator might be a homophobic straight guy, or a group of men (not necessarily all straight) operating within a homosocial space as they prove their heterosexuality via the harassment of others. Or the perpetrator could also be gay and approaching another gay man as I thought the two men above were initially. While these two options use hate-filled and sexualized language, respectively, in both instances the man is targeted because he is perceived to be gay. And either way, access to public spaces is being restricted.

So it’s more complex than my assumptions. My perception of the situation included both of these models. It was murky. I’m not sure that I would have rather been harassed in a clearer way, because I don’t want myself or anyone else to ever be harassed, but not understanding this incident has certainly stayed with me in a very different way. Did they want to sleep with me? Did they just want to rob someone? Or did they want to rob me because they perceived me to be gay? I can’t draw many conclusions, because if they wanted to rob me they certainly could have, and if they wanted to assault me they could have accomplished that as well. Maybe they were drunk and really had no goal other than to mess around with the nearest passerby. I’m really not sure.

What I do know is that I perceived the event in a way that I’m not sure all men would have. Men who are perceived to be gay or bisexual expect harassment in public spaces because of the ways that we interfere with some men’s ideas about appropriate masculinity and sometimes because our appearances might be pleasing to other men. In my own research that I’ve cited before, more than 70 percent of the gay and bisexual men I surveyed said they constantly assess their surroundings when they are navigating public spaces. This number, I imagine, is lower for those whose appearance is consonant with societal gender expectations.

So while I can’t be sure about what I experienced that night, I know what it felt like, and how it would have felt for others who experience harassment regularly. Not everyone walking down the street is about to harass, but when it happens often enough it’s hard not to think about. And that’s one of the things that makes street harassment so dangerous. It’s not forgotten. It takes up mental space. It’s complex. Sometimes we can’t make sense of it, but that shouldn’t be our responsibility. Equal access to public spaces is something we need now.

This is a guest post by Patrick McNeil. Patrick is finishing his master’s thesis at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he is pursuing his Master’s in Women’s Studies. His work focuses on whether and how gay and bisexual men experience street harassment and how this form of harassment intersects with and diverges from the gender-based street harassment of women. Follow him on Twitter at @patrickryne.

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Interview with UK Researcher

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Editor’s Note: Fiona Elvines is Operations Coordinator at Rape Crisis South London where she helps people who have experienced rape and/or childhood sexual abuse. She is also in her final year of PhD research at London Metropolitan University where she is studying street harassment.

Hollaback Edinburgh recently conducted an interview with her about her dissertation (The Great Problems are in the Streets: Women’s Experiences of Male Stranger Intrusion) and they kindly allowed me to excerpt some of it here. You can read the full interview on their site.

1. What led you to this research?

I came to this research initially through my work at Rape Crisis and thinking about how the impact of the routine intrusions women encounter from men on the street make it incredibly difficult to feel like you can move past an experience of criminalised sexual violence like rape. I wanted to know more about what women who have experiences along the continuum of sexual violence feel about intrusion from male strangers in public space, and how we strategise or make sense of ourselves through it. I was also really frustrated by the victim blaming I encounter in working in rape prevention and wanted to develop an evidence base for the numerous ways in which women already limit and adapt our daily movements based on men’s intrusive practices.

2. Why do you think this is under-researched?

I think that the study of all forms of male violence against women is still really young and that feminists have worked hard to capture the evidence needed for policy change on issues like rape, domestic abuse and childhood sexual abuse. As much as I think this focus has been and is necessary, I feel it’s resulted in a loss of interest in the routine aspects of men’s intrusive practices, missing a crucial aspect of women’s everyday experience. I also think male stranger intrusion is normalised, minimised and trivialised, and that the sheer frequency of intrusive encounters means forgetting is brought in as a natural coping strategy. The women I’ve spoken with have told me how, when they have spoken out about what they’ve experienced be it to friends or parents or a partner, they have been met with a response that minimises their experience of it, reframes the intrusion as complimentary, or simply tells her it’s just part of growing up. All of this has resulted in a lack of understanding in terms of the scale of the problem and the impact it has on women’s daily decision making, sense of safety and relationship to our bodies and our self. This is starting to change, particularly with the rise of blogs such as Hollaback and Everyday Sexism, which have meant that we are starting to get a sense of the extent to which women are negotiating men’s intrusion in public space and beginning to hear experiences that might help to validate our own.

3. What kind of response did you get when you put the call out for participants?

The response was amazing. I received over 150 emails from women within 2 hours of my call being tweeted.

4. Were you surprised by the response?

Completely. I really wasn’t expecting to speak to more than 20 women. I ended up with 51 participants who completed an initial conversation with me and then kept a diary of their experiences from 2 weeks to 2 months before talking to me again or sending through feedback about their findings and any changes or discoveries they had made during the course of the research. I feel the response itself demonstrates the extent to which women experience such encounters as meaningful in particular ways, and illustrates how spaces for us to talk about the meaning they have for us are difficult to find.

5. What would you say to people who have been street harassed?

The most important message to get out there I believe has to do with countering these early responses. You get to decide what does and doesn’t count as violence or intrusion or harassment. Your experience of it is valid and you get to choose the meaning that it has. I would also say that no one can tell you how you should, or if you should, respond, react or manage each encounter. Everyone I spoke with does some version of an escalation calculation to strategise their response based on perceived safety and personal contextual factors such as history, mood or simply tiredness. We can only benefit from an increase in women talking about experiences the whole way along the continuum of sexual violence. Hopefully moving us towards a more complete understanding of the complexity, impact and motivations behind men’s intrusive practices, and women’s resistance and resilience in the face of them.

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USA: Challenging Sexism with #NotBuyingIt

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By: Erin McKelle, SSH Correspondent

Street harassment, unfortunately, is a universal experience for women. In an informal survey conducted by Stop Street Harassment, 95% of women reported being leered at and having been honked or whistled at while 81% have been the targets of sexually explicit comments and 82% reported being the targets of vulgar gestures. This tells us that street harassment happens to virtually all women. Women are being violated in our streets every single day.

For some reason, we don’t seem to be all that concerned. Street harassment is not well recognized as a problem and is even talked about as being a reward for beauty or attractiveness. Recently, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City was quoted as having commented on a woman he found attractive at a holiday party, stating “Look at that ass on her.” Also, in 2001, a book was made as a kitschy present for Bloomberg’s 48th birthday which featured some of his most infamous quips. One of those was in regards to street harassment “ I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site and doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one.”

The fact that a highly respected figure can make comments like this and be revered for them by co-workers is astounding. Do you think comments like this would ever be tolerated in regards to rape or abuse? Why is street harassment treated so differently, as if it’s a joke or comic relief? There is nothing funny about women experiencing harassment as they are simply going about their day-to-day lives. There is nothing funny about women having to endure such behavior.

All of this comes back to the fact that women are seen as sexual commodities. Their bodies are men’s to behold and if you’ve got it, well, you deserve it. It doesn’t matter that you have a turtleneck sweater on; because you have large breasts its men’s right to gawk and make lewd comments…at least that’s what society says. Society tells men that women’s bodies are there to be ogled and that objectification is completely normal and even part of being a man! Reducing women to their body parts (especially the sexual ones) is how men are; they are visual, after all!

It’s attitudes like these that perpetuate street harassment. It’s also attitudes like these that perpetuate sexism, sexual violence and degradation. When we reduce women to a part of their body, we take away the human part of them. They no longer become a person worthy of respect and human decency; they become a mere object to be played with. Their feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas and convictions don’t matter because they are no longer viewed as fully human.

Because objectification is such a cultural norm (just take a look at some advertisements), these attitudes are normal. And because these attitudes are normal, street harassment is the norm. It’s also because of this normalcy that we don’t see the issue as a problem. That’s really at the heart of why we don’t talk about it. It can be made light of because it’s not seen real issue. That is why we have to work to call out injustice that we see and not tolerate it. This also means we can’t tolerate objectification and sexism in the media.

If you are interested in calling out advertisers for sexist and objectifying advertisements, then join Miss Representation on Super Bowl Sunday for their #NotBuyingIt Twitter campaign, in which they are going to be calling out sexism in ads that will be running in between game time. Simply watch the game, pay attention to the ads and when you see something you feel is sexist, send out a tweet to Miss Representation and the company with the hashtag #NotBuyingIt.

Campaigns like this are inspiring change in our world! Join in, take part and use your voice to end the attitudes and normalcy that cause street harassment to be silenced!

Erin is an e-activist and blogger based in Ohio. You can find more of her work here and here.

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USA: NYC Mayor has a Sexism Problem

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Image via Hollaback!

By: Talia Weisberg, SSH Correspondent

Since Michael Bloomberg has been mayor of New York City, my hometown and current city of residence, since I was seven years old, he’s the only mayor I can really remember. Ever since I was able to form an opinion on Bloomberg, I’ve felt pretty neutrally about him; I had never heard of anything he’d done that made me squeal in delight or gasp in horror.

As a result, I was really taken aback when I read that Bloomberg had said, “I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site and doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one.” It was recorded by Bloomberg LP employees in The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg, a 1990 book dedicated to record the mayor’s more memorable comments.

I had to read the quotation twice for its actual meaning to set in. At first, I was confused; is he trying to say that women will purposely walk past construction sites, even multiple times, to garner attention from the workers there? No, that can’t be, I must have read that incorrectly. Everyone knows that women don’t like that, that women will cross the street to avoid construction sites and the unwanted comments that often come with them. Then I read the quotation a second time and realized that my eyes hadn’t deceived me.

It’s so upsetting to find out that the man who has led my hometown for the past decade is so insensitive to street harassment, an issue so close to my heart. Bloomberg made it seem like women want and even vie for the chance to be catcalled. In reality, the polar opposite is true: women feel unsafe and humiliated and just plain grossed out when they are harassed on the street. I daresay that few people would go out of their way to have such an experience.

Upon doing research on Bloomberg’s history with sex discrimination, his track record is far from clean. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a class-action lawsuit against Bloomberg LP for 72 women who suffered from pregnancy-related discrimination. Another statement in The Portable Bloomberg is “If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.”

He also told NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, “Do you pay a lot to make your hair be two colors? Because now it’s three with the gray.” (Considering his own hair is gray, he’s got a lot of chutzpah.) Had I known all this, I wouldn’t have been so surprised that Bloomberg was so insensitive towards street harassment.

Well, Bloomberg’s final term will be up in November, and the mayoral position will be up for grabs. I certainly hope that his replacement will be more understanding of street harassment, and recognize the fact that it’s not just a catcall. It’s a women’s rights issue.

Talia Weisberg is a Harvard-bound feminist hoping to concentrate in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her work has appeared in over 40 publications and she runs the blog Star of Davida blog (starofdavida.blogspot.com).

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USA: Building male allies, one guy at a time

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By: Allison Riley, SSH Correspondent

A male friend of mine posted this image on Tumblr—it’s a Game Boy Color device turned to the side. I responded and said that I take offense to this photo because of the phrase “that ass”. Whether or not we realize it consciously, placing this phrase on top of an object immediately makes us compare it to a woman; thus participating in objectification. One looks at the curved battery compartment of the Game Boy and instantly connects it to the curves of a woman’s hips. When people find images like this humorous, it shows that they are condoning behavior that is considered harassment whether they realize it or not.

A mutual friend of ours posted the following statuses on her Facebook the next day:

“To the stranger downtown: First of all, I’m not your “Honey”…Ew. Secondly, no I’m not going to holla at you just because you think I’m pretty.”

“To stranger #2 from downtown: WTF you have no right to sexually harass me with “I’d beat that” while looking me up and down. I’m a classy effing lady, not a dog meant for your sick amusement. #ugh #omgwhatisupwithtoday”

 I noticed that the male friend I mentioned “liked” both of these statuses. I also know that he takes pride in calling himself a “nice guy,” yet his Tumblr post contradicted that. So I decided to give him a call. I told him to take a second look at the Game Boy photo he posted and to imagine that our friend was in the photo instead. Then would it be funny if the caption was “that ass”?

He ended up deleting the photo by the end of that week.

Then the other night, I was conversing with another male friend about gender-neutral bathrooms. He asked me if I would feel comfortable showering next to a guy. I said no because he might harass me. He replied, “What about a lesbian woman? Would you feel comfortable showering with her?”

“I already have before,” I said.

“And you don’t mind if she’s checking you out?”

“Well I know for a fact that she’s not,” I said.

“What if you didn’t know she was lesbian? Are you automatically trusting her because she’s the same sex as you?”

Generally yes, I trust women in public spaces—but mainly because none of my experiences with them thus far have been harmful to me. Only my experiences with men have been harmful; hence we say street harassment is motivated by gender.

My friend proceeded to tell me about how he has been slapped on the butt and harassed by gay men before. He has also gotten harassed by women when out alone. “I’ve had girls come up to me and basically behave like a guy,” he said. He elaborated further and we agreed that behaving “like a guy” equates actions like slapping someone’s butt, catcalling, and other unwanted gestures.

Immediately I wondered, why doesn’t he share his experience? Why don’t more guys speak up about this topic? I asked him, and he said that he simply doesn’t feel like he can. Or if he does, it won’t do anything. In reality, we all know it’s quite the opposite. It does make a difference because it will educate other men.  Sharing experiences and opinions will add to the bits of information surfacing about street harassment and male socialization.

And if you ask me, true masculinity consists of taking on that positive, educational role.

When building male allies in fighting street harassment, it helps to find common ground. It helps put the seriousness of the topic into perspective. The guys with common sense will admit that they hate being harassed in public just as much as we do and hate to see us go through it.

I directed both of these guys to check out the Male Allies section of this website. On to the next!

Allison is a 2012 graduate of Metropolitan State University of Denver where she majored in Journalism with a minor in women’s studies. Follow Allison on Twitter at @a_wonderlandd.

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