Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Speak up – you can save other people

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[Editor’s note: The following was posted in a comment on another story and I think it deserves its own post]

Today I took the subway in the middle of the afternoon to go run some errands.  I was inside of the train at Yonge and Eglinton station when a man standing beside me touched my upper part and whispered something in my ear. I got scared and I pushed him off…and moved towards the people. The subway was stopped for few minutes at that station when it happened.

The man got off the subway and disappeared. I thought nothing of it… Just that maybe he wanted to flirt, but then I saw him bug another lady on the platform.  That is when I decided to report him to the Authorities because I thought that he might escalate his intentions and do something even worse to someone else or someone weaker like a kid.  Or attack in the middle of the night. Who knows!! This happened in the middle of the afternoon!! With lots of people around… who know what he is capable of doing when there is no one around.

I am very satisfied with how police and the TTC Authorities handle the harassment. They made me feel confident that I made the right decision.  I actually feel happy to live in a place like Toronto. I feel safe because Police are really looking out for you….

So I encourage everyone who might be in a similar situation to SPEAK UP!!! You don’t lose anything and can save other people!

– TS

Location: Toronto subway

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“She’s got the short hair, she’s probably a fucking dyke.”

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No matter what day of the week, it is likely you will run into a number of drunken peers in my college town, and harassment isn’t uncommon. My friend and I are a couple of insomniacs, so the town at night no longer scares me like it might have a few years ago when I left home for the first time. I have heard the advice given to us womenfolk…you know, about staying off the streets at night, walking with buddies, blah blah blah and I’ve even been scolded by a complete stranger who witnessed one of my late night strolls. I didn’t take harassment that seriously because it only came to me in the form of whistles and compliments, both subtle and belligerent, but I absorbed them as misguided kindness or something of the like.

THEN…I cut my hair. I found feminism, saw the links between patriarchy and standards of female beauty and worth, and had my talented roomie cut it off one night after my boyfriend told me to “settle down.” Initial responses were amazing. Everyone loved it! Except my boyfriend and father, of course….but that didn’t matter. I felt liberated.

So it was around 1 a.m. on Franklin Street in this popular college town and I was walking into the neighboring town, Carrboro, to stay the night with a friend. I was walking down the street in a cardigan and pajama pants when a group of young, white, “fratty” types crossed the street and began walking towards me. As soon as they saw me they began to loudly and clumsily interrogate me. “Why ya wearing green pants, green pants girl? Look, she’s got a purple sweater, HEY PURPLE SWEATER GIRL.” They got closer and more in my face, and never one to avoid confrontation, I turned and said, “Maybe not heckle strangers, hey?”

They didn’t like that very much, and started up again with, “Welcome to a fucking college town, YEAH there’s gonna be drunk people, GOD, you fucking weirdo.” And then another “She’s got the short hair, she’s probably a fucking dyke.”

As I moved further away, the shouts became inaudible, and I walked on, angry that there was nothing else I could do. Angry that I didn’t have the guts to turn and really embarrass them. Angry that they felt they could say things like that to my face, in public, and without consequence.

I knew that the stories my short haired female friends had always told me were not the rare experiences, the anomalies I had originally written them off as. I doubt it would have ever happened that way if I had my long hair still. This isn’t the worst thing that has ever happened to someone on the streets, for sure…but I guess my point is that it should have never happened. Those guys shouldn’t feel entitled to yell at women on the streets, drunk or no. Harassment is harassment.

– Carissa Morrison

Location: Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC

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Street harassment is a trigger for rape survivors

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Street harassment from the perspective of a rape survivor:

Sometimes when I express my anger at street harassment, at my inability to move through public spaces freely, I feel as if I am dismissed. Other people, both men and women alike, tend to minimize it, saying, “Why let it bother you? It’s not that big of a deal.”

But I am a rape survivor, and for me, it is a big deal.

Every time I am harassed by men on the street, I am re-victimized. From leering, catcalls, and comments about my body, to stalking and groping — they all reduce me to an object. Not a person, but a thing. Something to have power over. All of these forms of harassment are triggers for me. They all induce the same sense of powerlessness, the feeling of invasion – they all take me back to when I was raped.

I know I am not the only one. There are so many other survivors, like me, who every day are forced to relive the experiences of their rapes by men on the street. Street harassment IS a big deal. It perpetuates the society which allows men to treat women as objects, to have power over them, to assault them, to rape them. Street harassment is sexual assault, it is sexual violence, and we must work to end it now.

I am not an object, and I will not be silent.

– AH

Location: Everywhere

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Male bonding at the expense of women

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My friend and I were walking downtown on the sidewalk. On our side of the street were two guys sitting on a porch and on the other side was a group of guys dressed in all black. We were ignoring them until one of the two guys on the porch shouted, “My friend here thinks you two are cute!” Then the group on the other side of the street started shouting back to them, saying that they were going to “get us.” They kept encouraging each other, adding things like “Go get them, tiger!” and we were afraid they were following us, but thankfully, they never did.

– anonymous

Location: Davison, MI

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So, I’m pretty? That doesn’t oblige me to sleep with you.

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This piece by Amelia Wells is cross-posted with permission.

Chatting with my step-dad in the study the other day, I started flicking through his guides to Andalucia, Catalonia and Barcelona. A photo of the Placa De Catalunya popped out of me, the fountain square at the head of La Rambla, Barcelona’s most interesting street, and I remembered sitting down in the shade, checking out the crowd, enjoying resting my legs, when an elderly gentleman came and sat beside me.

The elderly gentleman in Barcelona inquired if I was cold and pointed to my goosebumps. ‘I’m fine, I have a jumper’ I responded/mimed. Then he began to rub me. Now, I am not going to move from my spot because someone decides it’s okay to fucking touch me. I laughingly asked him to stop. He did for a bit, then invited me back to his piso (flat) to get warm. ‘No, I have a jumper, thank you.’ Again with the rubbing. With less laughter this time, I asked him to stop. Bedamned if I was going to move or put my jumper just because this guy wouldn’t stop touching me. I want to sit here, jumperless and goosepimply and NOT BE HARRASSED. Thanks. Eventually, I left. Annoyed and frustrated and giving the evil eye to every man I saw after that.

Now, in Madrid I had been reading in some park or other when an elderly gentleman approached me, asked me if I was a tourist, asked my name, asked how I liked Madrid, and I answered him in halting Spanish. We had the same name! We bonded! He was incredibly polite and I really enjoyed my interaction with him. As he rose to leave, I stood also, we did the cheek kissy thing and both left with a better opinion of the respective age groups involved.

Later in Barcelona, perhaps another day, a man came up to me in the street of an evening and told me I was pretty. ‘I know’ I replied. ‘Come for a drink with me?’ No, I have to meet my friends. (I hate telling this lie. If you rape/murder me, PEOPLE WILL KNOW! I’d rather be able to say “I’m alone. Leave me alone.” and trust that people are good people.) He repeats that I’m pretty, or beautiful, or something about my eyes and takes my hands. Firmly. In his. No, I reply. I have to meet people. I have to be somewhere. I don’t want to go for a drink with you. Please, let go of me. ‘Your friends can wait! This is more important! You’re so pretty!’ DUDE. You haven’t even asked my name. You know nothing about my interests. Sure, we might realise that we’re soulmates over a drink in a dimly lit bar, but since you’re asking me out solely on the basis of my looks, I’m really doubting that we’ll find a lot to talk about. I could chat with you about veganism and respecting everybody regardless of their looks, body size, political leanings or skin colour? I’m not suggesting that I don’t respect you, but I really don’t want to go and have a drink with a stranger, in a strange city who WON’T LET GO OF MY HANDS WHEN I ASK HIM TO. ‘But you’re so pretty!’ I KNOW.

Telling me that I’m pretty, or beautiful doesn’t make me go swoony on the inside. Even when people I actually like and respect tell me so. I appreciate that they want to tell me something nice, but my looks are completely incidental to WHO I AM. I was born this way, I grew up with this face and body and I did not make it in this fashion in order to lure men into my pants. I would far rather be conversed with, had my opinions discussed and generally, have my mind acknowledged.

Dancing in a club in England a couple of months ago with my friend Bex, a young, drunk, guy approached us and began enthusing about my dancing. I dance exactly the way I feel and just completely let myself go, for my pleasure. I love moving my body to dubstep, and the way the beat flows through me…So, I completely dance for myself. I appreciate it when people appreciate that because I hope that it inspires other people to not worry about what other people think of them on the dancefloor. Anyway, this chap seemed to believe that telling me I was sexy and amazing at dancing should have elicited more of a response from me than ‘Thanks.’ Possibly ‘Oh my god, nobody has ever been as nice about me as you have, of course I will accompany to your bedroom this moment’?

These are all fairly minor events but they each illustrate this assumption that men believe it is okay for them to touch a woman, to grip her hands, to pressure her into going with them to wherever they want to go. This sort of mentality, that of control, is the first step, the beginnings of the idea that men should be able to tell women what to do, they should be allowed sex, they should have access to women’s bodies whenever they want. The boy in the club didn’t touch me, but he sure expected me to be a lot more grateful about the fact that he had noticed me to compliment. These assumptions on the part of men that all they have to do is make a nicety and they can take whatever they want PISSES ME THE FUCK OFF.

This shit is reinforced in every woman’s magazine and men’s magazine and advert for make-up and teevee show and film and book and song I’ve ever read. It’s ALL ABOUT HOW BEAUTIFUL THE WOMAN IS and as soon as the man ‘realises’ or ‘acknowledges’ that to the woman ‘Oh, I find your eyes so mesmerising’ then the woman’s belly goes gooey and they fall into bed having realised their true love for each other.

It is SO INGRAINED that complimenting someone on their looks, clothes, hair is important, or matters, that even writing this I’m thinking ‘Well, surely it’s cool when one of your friends says that you look nice today’. But, what the fuck does it matter how you look? On any level. Ever. Really? I would absolutely so much rather be complimented on my style of discussion, on my passion for pointing shit like this out, on the way I use language, anything that I’ve actually WORKED HARD ON or MEANS SOMETHING TO ME. I would rather be known and understood before being complimented. I think my favourite single compliment ever as been ‘I like the way your brain works’ from someone I had ranted at in great detail about the injustices in the world and spent some serious amounts of time with, who knew me. And he didn’t even say it to get into my pants.

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