Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

“The man that harassed me got arrested”

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I was going to the gas station when a black man noticed I had on a redskins coat, and he commented that he was a cowboy fan. I was polite and kept it moving.

This man was on his way out of the gas station, he followed me back into the gas station and asked me out. I told him I was married.

This crazy person then started talking jibberish about giving him a chance. I rushed out of the gas station and this fool followed me and he was still harassing me. I RAN to my car. I sped off in my car and this fool followed me and threw something at my car. Fortunately there was a police precinct close by. I immediately reported this loser.

Just because I am a black woman does not give a black man I do not know the right to harass me. I did not know this man and I did not owe him anything. I take good care of myself and I have a nice shape, and unfortunately I deal with harassment from Black men on a regular basis.

I believe these men think that just because we are members of the same race that they have a right to us. I honestly believe that a lot of these men feel dis-empowered in all aspects of their lives, but think they have power over black women and a right to harass Black women, but no one owes them anything. I don’t owe a damn thing to a person I do not know and it is a shame that I have grown afraid of Black male strangers in public settings.

I’m sorry, but I am going to keep it real: (1) I am a lawyer and don’t want anything to do with an unemployed man that harasses women on the street and (2) I am married to a hard working black man that treats me well.

Something has to be done about this harassment. The man that harassed me got arrested. Black women, keep cell phones on you and start reporting these fools to the cops. If enough of us do this, perhaps we can assist in giving a message that enough is enough.

– Anonymous

Location: East Capital Street, Exon, Northeast Washington, DC

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“It makes me almost paranoid to walk down the street”

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I am 20 years old, and when I walk down the street and I am wearing a nice dress, nothing too provocative, but just a simple dress, I get whistles, people address me as baby, and people yell things at me from their cars or honk when i pass, which is very embarrassing when I am with a friend or when anyone I know is watching me.

It makes me almost paranoid to walk down the street with someone because I know I am going to get a catcall or yells from someone in their cars or passing by and it is humiliating.

The only other thing i can do is put a paper bag over my head and my bottom. Because this happens everyday, it’s just when i wear a dress it happens more frequently and ostentatiously.

This guy was whistling at me over and over and i chose to ignore it until a guy walking by said, “Hey! You know he’s whistling at you, right?”

I can’t avoid it even if i want to.

I’ve heard comments like “You can ride on the handlebars of my bike if you want” and when i am just waiting for the bus a guy comes up and says, “Hey this describes you” showing me a perfume for “hot women” and i try to ignore them but then they say i am mean.

I walk to my house and a mailman gets out of his delivery truck and yells at me, “Hey baby!” and I say leave me alone and he continues to harass me until I walk away more quickly. I think it’s degrading and i want it to stop. If someone thinks I am attractive they can stop and talk to me politely but whistling, harassment, and referring to me as “baby” are not polite and they are not compliments.

It’s not that I don’t feel safe physically, it’s just i don’t feel safe mentally, or emotionally. I don’t feel safe to walk down the street in not even heels, but wedges, because guys pass by me really close and mutter incoherently, and I get whistles from cars, and it is agony. This shouldn’t be happening.

– Anonymous

Location: Miami, FL

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T.I., “Gender Night,” and Unlearning Misogyny

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By Joel Anderson

Who knows what @doope_4evr was really looking for when he ventured onto @starquality’s Instagram account and asked her the following: “Can we fuck?”

Maybe he lacked the confidence to earnestly ask a pretty girl out for a date. Maybe he lacked the decency to better disguise his most base urges. Maybe he just wanted some attention.

If it was the latter, @doope_4evr should consider his indecent proposal a success: he got all of the attention of @starquality’s father, hip-hop and reality TV star T.I.

“U ever disrespect me and mines like that again,” he warned, “I’m gon throw more $$$ at ya head than it cost to build yo mama a new house.”

And on and on it went.

It all made me wonder where @doope_4evr developed the temerity to approach a woman in such a manner, and whether T.I. was suffering from a total absence of self-awareness.

Of course, few people could blame T.I. for his anger and protective instincts. That’s his daughter — “mines,” he said.

He’s also the same guy who once rapped, “Ay T.I.P. been bangin’ thick dames since he was 15/the click came ran trains if her shit clean.”

This woman, real or imagined for musical purposes, is someone’s daughter. Maybe girlfriend. Possibly mother. Someone else’s “mines.”

Before we go any further, here’s an admission: I love T.I. and his music. As far as hip hop artists go, he’s fairly progressive in his attitude toward women. Check “Freak Though,” if you don’t believe me.

I know I have my own hypocrisy to deal with, from my previous romantic entanglements to my music choices.

But at the least, I got a headstart on confronting that hypocrisy. It started in earnest when I was 17, the summer before my senior year of high school, at a leadership camp just outside of Houston.

There were about 75 of us, teenagers who came from all over southeast Texas. We were there to challenge our beliefs, confront our prejudices, and push our boundaries. I was also there to meet cute girls and earn the service credits needed for graduation, but I didn’t share that with anyone.

It was a great week. I met one of my very best friends there. We put on a moderately entertaining talent show. Every night had a theme: the one I remember most vividly, 17 years later, was Gender Night.

Camp counselors separated us, boys and girls, and told us we couldn’t sit together or speak to each other until later that night at a so-called “War of the Sexes.” This would be our summer airing of grievances.

Imagine the ripple of excitement that went through our camp.

Fledgling misogynists that we were, it didn’t take long for the boys to come up with a lengthy list of complaints about girls: too much talking, putting out too much, not putting out enough, excessive whining, no swallowing. Basically, the kind of mature discussion points you’d expect from guys who had little experience with women or girls other than with their mothers or sisters.

So before the big event, the boys were told to get into a single line as we gathered outside the camp’s central building. Then, a twist: we were told we had to go in one at a time. The girls would be waiting on us.

I was first in line. The room was dark. All was silent.

I nervously walked inside and briskly walked down the narrow path to the other side of the room. The girls were lined up on each side of the path, and bombarded me with the sorts of lewd catcalls that I had laughed off for much of my life.

No, I wasn’t scared or intimidated. In fact, I was flattered at the attention because I didn’t know any better. I was later told the girls had turned their backs and gone silent to the boys who made a game of it.

Later, and even more affecting, were the stories of harassment from our female campers. Virtually everyone had a story to tell.

One girl told of being followed home by a stranger during one of her evening runs. Another told us of her daily walk to school, which was essentially the experience our camp counselors had tried to recreate for us a few minutes prior. The last story of the night was told by bright-eyed girl who had caught my eye earlier in the camp: her laughter sounded like wind chimes, she moved with uncommon certainty for a teenager and, yes, I made my way over to the pool when she laid out to get some sun.

She had all of my attention. And soon enough, she had everyone’s attention.

A couple years ago, she told us, she and one of her friends had been gang-raped after leaving a house party. That was all I remember because, for me, it was enough.

Just like that, the war was over. This was no longer a silly teenage exercise in unpacking our most lewd thoughts.

Either we could be complicit in a culture that permitted the mistreatment and harassment of women, or we could hold ourselves, our friends and our family members accountable for the misogyny. 

We had a responsibility to unlearn.

As boys, we had to learn that all women and girls deserved better than our crude war-room banter, whether it came at camp or from our favorite musicians. We would need to, from that point forward, respect more than “mines.” And as men, we have to pass these lessons on to our boys.

Which brings me back to @doope_4evr, @starquality and T.I.

I’m fairly certain T.I. never envisioned his daughter as the thick dame getting a train ran on her. How could he?

But I do wonder what he thought when that world he created for other women showed up on his daughter’s Instagram account.

Joel Anderson is an award-winning reporter at the Tampa Bay Times and a regular contributor to PostBourgie, a blog that deals primarily with issues of class, race, gender, culture and media.  He has previously worked at the Shreveport (La.) Times, the Associated Press in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Houston and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Anderson has also contributed to publications including The Huffington Post, The Root, and The American Prospect, among many others. He is better known in the blogosphere and Twitter-verse as J.D. Bell, @blackink12 and@jdhometeam.

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“I left with rage, fear and stress inside me”

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I am a young Moroccan woman who lives in North America. I recently traveled to Morocco and wore conservative clothes (traditional long and large jellaba). I was not covering my hair most of the time. I am pretty but nothing extraordinary and I do look Arab.

This was the first time I was traveling alone in Morocco and I left this country feeling sick and exhausted because of the constant harassment. I started to avoid leaving my hotel room and got some symptoms of panic attacks at the idea of going back in some souks or streets where I had reacted to being harassed.

Men would follow me, every minutes men would say to me, “Ca va? or whisper to me things that I could not always understand. I was particularly distressed by cars or vans following me then stopping and men inside inviting me to join them in their cars.

One time, I was so distressed by these cars following me that i shouted in English to one driver, “I will call the police if you don’t stop that.” He got scared and went away but I was left feeling miserable, afraid and stressed.

I felt rage when I saw men in uniforms (gardeners in parks, men working at gas stations, workers) talking to me as well even though I did not ask them anything. They would say in Arabic things like, “So what do you want?”

Many times I wanted to cry when I would go in souks and see virtually all the men staring at me with their eyes wide open and no shame at all.

One time, a man jumped from a taxi to talk to me. He had been following me in the taxi.

Going out was too uncomfortable and draining so I stopped going alone outside.

When I was back in North America, I felt a wonderful sense of relief and understood how affected I had been by all this harassment. One month after the trip, I was still thinking about it. I do believe that it was a traumatic experience.

I went back to Morocco to reconnect with my roots and was so proud of my heritage but I have to say that I left with rage, fear and stress inside me. The saddest part is that I am no longer particularly proud to be Moroccan as I felt that streets were a savage environments for women.

It made me think as well about the fact that this harassment is coming form a population who is deeply religious, Muslim. It did really affect me on many level and I want to define myself as a North American from now on. I don’t anymore recognize my values of respect, honesty, kindness in Morocco. Sad trip.

– Anonymous

Location: Morocco, big and small towns

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We Leave the World Outside

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Editor’s Note: This blog post is cross-posted with permission from Cris’s blog Go the Way Your Blood Beats.

Preface: This is an older poem that addresses street violence and harassment. As a gender non conforming person of color, street harassment is an everyday reality.  It always astounds me how much the violence increases when I am traveling with a perceived “femme.” I can write some of the violence off as patriarchy, homophobia, fear, but intellectualizing it still doesn’t take away the after effects of violence, my body literally tenses up.

I am constantly thinking about negotiating space, when not to hold hands, which group of cis-men I should avoid, I constantly think about my safety and my partner/lover’s safety.  I also think about how as queer people this effects our interpersonal relationships.   When the outside world DOES creep into our beds, how do we take care of ourselves?  How do we empower ourselves in a world that strips us of dignity and attempts to make us feel ashamed of who we are.  What psychological and physical effects does this have on our community as a whole?

I have done searches online on safety planning specifically for street harassment for Queer folks and I’ve yet to find any.  Most resources are centered on intimate partner violence (straight & queer), but what about stranger violence? If you have resources please share. I will repost.

be safe.
-Cris

Cris Izaguirre is a Latin@, queer, poet, farmboi, producer, wanderer, lover of green things.  Raised in Brooklyn, NY, born in Nicaragua. Follow Cris on twitter @criswordsmith.  Check out their blog.
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We Leave the World Outside
for M

Beneath my red, pink, yellow stripped sheets

trace your flushed

cheeks with my thumb

kiss the corners of your mouth

Leave the world outside

 

See, outside in the world

our kind of love

is met with purple bruises

crimson splatter concrete, fists and broken teeth

bones split so easily

words shatter sternum

“Bitch! Dyke! Faggot!

You wanna be a man?

I’ll show you what a man is”

 

Inside, we mend love

suture muscle and flesh

using lips and tongue

“Saturate me” you say

I let the tears fall

heavy as sin

onto your collarbone

Leave the world outside

 

Lover, I fear

my skin and bones

aren’t steel

aren’t enough

to protect you

To risk a kiss on the Q train

to risk touching your face

on Ocean Avenue

before the change of a traffic light

to hold your lifeline in mine

 

At night I dream

the world is trying to get inside

underneath our sheets

onto our bodies

I wake up gasping for air

You pull me by my chin

Pull the red, pink, yellow stripped sheets

Over our heads

“Leave the world outside.”

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