Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
I’m 16 years old. Yesterday when I was with my mum, a man walked past by me and his hand touched my back. When my mum asked me, “Did he touch you?” I said yes and we both ran after him…. he was so quick that he vanished in a flash of a second… the surrounding people didn’t even bothered 2 help in catching that person.
– TR
Location: Mumbai, India
Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea.
I am a women in her 30s in UK. I live alone in my hometown. A man about five years ago was really creepy towards me, making a pass at me. Then I didn’t see him for five years. In 2015, he noticed my place of work and he started walking past three times a day. And then he began following me home, shouting rude, sexual comments daily.
One day when he followed me, I turned and said to him leave me alone. So I thought that would be the end of him harassing me. But he started again. A police officer said to phone them, so I made a statement. The man has done it to other women in the past, an officer told me recently.
It made me feel alone, anxious and lose confidence.
– nicola mclearie
Location: Scarbough, UK
Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea.
I’m 13 years old and yesterday at night I went grocery shopping with my dad. My dad had forgotten something, so I went ahead. While I waited for him, a car passed by and the guy in the passenger seat said, “Hey baby girl.” The guy stayed there for like about 30 seconds just checking me out. I didn’t say anything because this guy was like more than 20 years old . I felt weird. Idk. I definitely didn’t like it at all.
– Anonymous
Location: California
Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea.
This post is from our Safe Public Spaces Team in Bucharest, Romania. The SPSM projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!
Ta-naaa! We’ve completed the Mentoring Program and we are happy because it was a great experience for us, as activist and working in the NGO sector and for the high school students as well! Thanks to Stop Street Harassment Mentoring Program we had this amazing chance to meet teenagers girls and boys and to speak with them delicate subjects like violence and street harassment.
During the time between August and December 2015 FILIA Centre, a feminist NGO from Bucharest, Romania, implemented the project “High school girls and boys for a city without street harassment!” financed by Stop Street Harassment NGO.
We are Simona-Maria Chirciu, Stefania Vintila and Loredana Valcianu, members of the FILIA Centre and we gladly complete the Program Mentoring with great success and smiles. We’ve organized three workshops for 60 high school teenagers from the Technic College of Aeronautics “Henri Coanda” in Bucharest. We talked with the participants about discrimination, equal opportunities, violence against women, and street harassment and the activism against it all around the world. The principal from the high school and the female teacher who runs the department of Program and Projects of this institution and also some of the teachers were very open regarding the subject we wanted to address and regarding our project. We had their full support in implementing it and we are very grateful for this.
We encouraged the participants to get involved in the discussion by giving examples of discrimination, violence and harassment from their own experience or from the experience of their friends. They were interested by the subject mostly because we were talking about experiences that happened to them or to their loved ones too, experiences about nobody talks about. In Romania street harassment represents a taboo: nobody talks about it, many men deny it and some women barely if they have courage to complain about it to anyone who is not their friends.
At the end of the workshops we organized a contest: the high school boys and girls could use any material to depict street harassment as a form of violence. We encouraged them to show a solution that in their opinion is suitable for the Romanian context in order to prevent or to end street harassment against women. The teenagers were very interested and did their best for this contest. They created videos, drawings, essays, and powerpoint presentations and a poster as well. Their perspectives were so interesting and the way they see equal access to the public space for men and women helps us to incorporate their experiences in everything that we organize on this subject in the future.
In the implementation of this project we had the support of our former volunteer Aila Veli and our colleague Mihaela Sasarman from Transcena Association, an NGO in Romania, who has many years of experience working on the issue of violence against women and specifically working with perpetrators.
The girls and boys who participated offered us a very, very positive feedback about our interaction with them, about the way we presented the subject and about the way we involved them in the process of defining the role each of us has to create a society free of harassment in public spaces. They asked us to return to their high school soon with workshops to talk about rape, teenager relations and other subjects from the same domain.
We are grateful for all the support from Holly and Stop Street Harassment! We, as a team evolved and learned so much. Indeed, working with teens on street harassment issue is challenging but so rewarding! We recommend this kind of experience to other activists on street harassment worldwide!
Simona-Maria Chirciu, Stefania Vintila and Loredana Valcianu are members of the FILIA Centre.
This post is from our Safe Public Spaces Team in Lyon, France. The SPSM projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!
The Stop Street Harassment mentoring program comes to an end with the holiday and we must confess, it’s so good to rest! Especially so when having accomplished everything you had in mind and more, and looking forward to even bigger developments!
From a material point of view, we’ve manage to print three copies of our exhibition, all on thick laminated paper. Two in size A4 and one in size A3. This allowed us to use it in different places at the same time and, since the posters are very light, to send it via regular post without any difficulty. Also, the city council of Grenoble, who displayed it on huge panels, was so thrilled about the outcomes of the project that our contact asked us permission to re-print the version we came up to together on roll-ups and already booked six one-week-long exhibitions in different places of the city for 2016.
We’ve received several other requests for renting our exhibition, coming from city councils, universities, high schools or non-profit organizations. The variety of organizations wishing to use it is proof to us that street harassment is an issue that a lot of people feel concerned about, as everyone should, that people are ready to speak up whenever offered an opportunity to do so and that public representatives are willing to broach the subject with us. The latter has been proved recently by the French government launching a campaign on his own against sexist harassment in public transportation. We feel very proud to have achieved such a recognition of the problem.
Since our mid-way blog post in October, we have had time to compile the many feedback we’ve got from places we showed our exhibition and from its visitors as well. And it has been very positive ! People reported that this was a really fun way to approach such a subject and, whatever the age or profile of the visitor, having learned or discovered at least one thing they’d never thought about. Here lies the real achievement for us, and it was great to collect all kinds of comments.
Last but not least, our project is far from done, and it fills us with joy and great expectations ! Stop Harcèlement de Rue is composed by several groups in different cities, and some of them feel comfortable to use the exhibition for their school workshops and presentations. So it will be sent to Paris and another city yet to be chosen. But the big news is we made a new partner, the team organizing the Lyon BD Festival, a comics festival taking place in June. Together, we’ll launch a fundraising campaign at the beginning of February to be able to pay new artists for added posters and design to the exhibition. We’re already in touch with half a dozen of illustrators and comics authors who are willing to participate. The augmented exhibition will be printed on big roll-ups and presented during the week of the festival in a well frequented place in the city center. We will then use this new version for our own events and workshops.
So this has been four exciting months for us, we feel that we’ve been able to start making a difference on the street harassment matter and that strong enriching partnerships have emerged and will allow us to continue.
We wish to thank Holly and Stop Street Harassment again for their support and kindness, and hope we’ll be able to meet in the flesh someday!
Anne Favier co-directs Stop Harcèlement de Rue – Lyon.