Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

USA: Time Machine: Street Harassment

By

Elizabeth Kuster, Brooklyn, NY, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

When I first started making notes about the harassment I received from random men on a daily basis — and began talking to other women about it, to get their stories — thousands of people around the country were taking buses to Washington so they could march in protest of the Republican president who was trying to limit a woman’s right to choose.

The beating of a Black man by a group of white police officers had created a dark and disturbing negative energy in New York City. Thousands of demonstrators in Times Square were protesting against police departments’ blatant racial discrimination.

A female editor from the same publication that was going to print my first street harassment article was working on an exposé of the pay-or-play casting couch. “Hollywood’s ugliest secret goes public, but will actresses take action against a power broker who can make them a star?” she asked, before quoting a frustrated Halle Berry: “How many complaints will have to be filed before something happens to these guys?”

I can testify firsthand that it is really hard to write about street harassment when there’s so much other terrible shit going on.

Meanwhile, in my personal life, I had just been dumped by the stable (read: unimaginative) older man I thought I loved. (“I need some space,” he said — proving that even when breaking up, he wasn’t capable of originality.) I was in the midst of casually dating an actor/comedian (!) while dealing with crippling menstrual cramps that kept me laser-focused on my uterus for far too many days a month.

And through it all, I was keeping a diary of all of the random ugly comments, stares, propositions and unwanted touches I was receiving from strange men on a daily basis. Let me tell you: It’s hard to “go high” like Michelle Obama when the cultural mood — and the article you’re working on — demand that you focus for months on the lowest of the low. And that lowest of the low is alternately staring at you, ordering you to smile, stroking your hair on the subway train and yelling things like, “I want to f*ck you!” and “You got a fat ass!”

Anyway, I guess it’s time for me to tell you when all of this was going on in my world. You probably think you know. But I bet you don’t.

Hint: It wasn’t 2017.

It wasn’t 2016, either.

Give up?

It was 1992.

1992, people.

Nineteen.

F*cking.

Ninety.

Two.

Here’s the cover of the September, 1992, issue of Glamour magazine, which featured my groundbreaking cover story on street harassment:

It was the first time the topic had ever been covered in the mainstream media. A few articles describing a phenomenon called “street harassment” had been published in academic journals or a feminist publication, but that was about it. Back then, I looked toward the future with hope, confident that my article, which ultimately reached 15 million American readers, would empower women and help lawmakers name, fight, and eventually put an end to the problem.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

So perhaps my current despair is understandable. Because I seem to be stuck in a feminist’s Groundhog Day. On the face of it, so very little has changed. It’s 25 years since my article came out, and street harassment — and so many other issues — are still huge problems.

The September 1992 issue of Glamour featured Charla Krupp’s prescient article about Hollywood’s casting couch. Today, there’s Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, #TimesUp, and #MeToo.

In May of 1992, there were race riots after the beating of Rodney King. Today, there’s Trayvon Martin, #BlackLivesMatter, the Wall, the Muslim Ban, and ICE.

On April 5, 1992, a massive pro-choice march took place in D.C. Just this week, Republicans tried to shove through yet another misogynist abortion ban. A pussy grabber is in the White House. Women are marching by the millions. And I’m still hoping against hope that I will someday find a human being with a penis who is capable of loving and supporting me and my uterus.

But of course, some things have changed. In my upcoming blogs for Stop Street Harassment, I will revisit my original article and its aftereffects, and explore some of the progress women have made since 1992 in the areas of personal space and physical safety. I’ll celebrate our victories and spotlight areas that still need work. Because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And it’s high time for us women to put this particular Groundhog Day to bed once and for all.

Stay tuned.

Elizabeth pitched and wrote the very first mainstream-media article about street harassment. She has held full-time editorial positions at publications such as Glamour, Seventeen and The Huffington Post and is author of the self-help/humor book Exorcising Your Ex. You can follow Elizabeth on Twitter at @bethmonster.

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USA: A Case to Bring Bystander Interventionism and Anti-Harassment Education into Primary Schools

By

Patrick Hogan, Chicago, IL, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Credit: Brian Evans, Flickr

Harassment is not an uncommon occurrence, but it is often a taboo subject to address. Now, in the wake of the popularization of the #MeToo movement, it is time harassment is discussed openly. The obvious first question: How should we as a society deal with it?

Many activists think the most efficient way to fight street harassment is via culture change—to teach students, as young as primary school students, to dispel negative gender stereotypes and to be active bystanders in harassment situations.

Street harassment is largely ignored as a societal issue though, despite 65 percent of women and 25 percent of men in the United States having been harassed in public streets, according to a SSH-commissioned report. The same report found that 10 percent of victims were harassed by 12 years of age. Most legislative attempts made to stem the frequency of street harassment fall short of their goal: they consist of vague laws and statutes that are difficult to enforce. Harassment on public streets has become just something that happens—if this is the attitude we accept than street harassment will be ignored, left as a societal vice we must learn to live with.

Learning to live with street harassment has been the predominant educational initiative. That is, when discussing harassment with our children, we tend to teach them to be vigilant, how to dress, defensive measures, and how to behave in public so as not to be harassed. These are reactive measures; we assume harassment is an inevitability, so we teach methods of avoiding it, hoping a harasser will find a different person to victimize. While it is most certainly important to teach our children to be aware of their surroundings and how to protect themselves, reactive education is not going to end street harassment. We need proactive solutions: education that teaches not to accept harassment as an unfortunate reality of civil society.

Harassment should not be a taboo issue. If 10 percent of harassment victims were harassed by the age of 12, then educational initiatives should be enacted before children reach the age of 12. Bystander intervention should be championed: it is understood that if someone witnesses a bullying incident and does not interve, that person is siding with the bully. However, if that person intervenes, the bully is shown that his/her behavior will not be tolerated and is not supported, or the victim will know he/she is not alone and the aforementioned behavior is not appreciated.  The same applies to street harassment and gender based violence (GBV).

A report by Public Health England found evidence for bystander intervention as a productive method for combating GBV and creating a culture change on in college students. “Research evidence suggests that males who have negative gender role attitudes and who also endorse the belief that such violence is acceptable among their peers are more likely to perpetrate violence” (Fenton, et all, pg. 20). If a harasser’s own social circle refuses to tolerate harassment, the harasser is likely to stop. If harassment is not accepted as part of society then harassers (or would-be harassers) will likely refrain from harassment.

In Kenya, the nongovernmental organization Ujamaa Africa has seen phenomenal success in creating a culture change with bystander intervention. Ujamaa Africa hosts a 6-week course presented to school children called Your Moment of Truth that teaches positive masculinity, defense, and empowerment to boys and girls. The Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that Ujamaa Africa’s education program increased young boys’ intervention rate when exposed to GBV or harassment. Seventy-eight percent of the boys studied intervened when they witnessed violence and 75 percent intervened when they witnessed verbal harassment. Education-based culture change has and is working. Now we need to adapt education-based culture change into our communities and classrooms.

In Washington, D.C. City Councilmember Brianne K. Nadeau is on the forefront of the movement to change the culture surrounding street harassment with her introduction of the Street Harassment Prevention Act (SHPA) into the city council. The bill would require city employees to be trained as active bystanders to intervene in harassment-related situations, empower a committee to issue grants to initiatives to stop harassment, and would require a public awareness campaign. This is a positive step in the right direction: a campaign to create culture change and train community members to intervene.

This sort of effort should go further, to extend to the schoolhouse. Nuala Cabral of Temple University Community Collaborative (and former SSH board member) said at a Nov. 2017 roundtable discussion with a Philadelphia State Senate Committee, “We need to emphasize the importance of teaching consent. Honestly, we can start at kindergarten, we can start talking about consent. Students are hungry about this conversation and they’re not having it.”

This idea of beginning education into empowerment, toxic gender stereotypes, sexuality, harassment, and consent might seem a bit shocking to many in the U.S., but it has shown success in Ujamaa Africa’s program and is already institutionalized in every school in the Netherlands.

Preventing harassment should not merely be the responsibility of victims and potential victims. Harassment is not a merely a personal issue, it is a societal one. By creating culture change, by teaching children at a young age to dispel negative gender stereotypes and to intervene in harassment we can purge the acceptance of street harassment from our culture. Harassment is not uncommon and talking about it often seems taboo, but we can create a culture in which the opposite is reality.

Patrick is an undergraduate student majoring in anthropology and minoring in Islamic World Studies at Loyola University Chicago, preparing to continue onto law and graduate school. He is particularly interested in legal anthropology and the ways victims are viewed by legal systems.

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USA: The Guilt of Generations

By

Isha Raj-Silverman, San Diego, CA, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Credit: Slutwalk Atlanta, April 2016

I was fourteen years old when I first experience street harassment. Granted, the perpetrators were young- high school, maybe college-aged young men outside an ice cream parlor – but it was still a devastating reminder at a very young age that not everyone believed my body was my own.

Three-and-a-half years later, I can still see that moment as clearly as if it were yesterday. I remember the flood of fear and the urge to hide. I remember putting my head down and walking quickly away and not acknowledging that anything had happened. I remember exactly what I was wearing and which textbook I clutched tighter to my chest. I remember changing my after school routine to try to keep it from happening again. I doubt a single one of those boys remember that moment.

Moments like that one define the experience of walking down the street for every teenage girl I know, and as a senior in high school, I know a lot of teenage girls. Street harassment defines where we walk, when we walk, and who we walk with. We know not to walk past the bars, or walk alone at night. This we learned from experience, but we also learned it from our mothers and grandmothers and older sisters. Women are taught prevention, rather than teaching men not to be perpetrators (there is a minority of cases which have been perpetrated by women and/or had male victims, but these are not the subject of this piece). In my experience, this has been nearly as damaging as harassment itself.

From the time I hit puberty in late elementary school, my mother began drilling into my head how to dress to “minimize male attention.” I have worn baggy clothes and ill-fitting sweatshirts and conservative one-piece bathing suits for years in a futile quest not to be harassed. In the past year, I have begun dressing in ways that make me feel more attractive, and which are often tighter than the clothes chosen by my mother for so many years. The amount I have been harassed has been virtually unchanged, but I continue to struggle with body image as it relates to the male gaze. I am constantly worried that I either look frumpy or provocative, because I cannot lose the voice in the back of my head telling me that tighter clothes will make men notice me in ways that will make me uncomfortable, but I cannot help but feel unattractive in shapeless clothing clearly meant for those much older or younger than me.

It is often the fear of what might happen rather than the fear of what already has that keeps me off certain streets or causes me to dress differently in different places. And if I do something I was told was “wrong” and am harassed, this behavior makes me blame myself. Our prevention behavior is well-meaning victim blaming. It doesn’t get to the root of the problem, and it institutionalizes a belief that our behavior invites comment.

Our bodies are our own. We should be able to dress them up however we like and take them wherever we like with whomever we like, and that should never be up to the judgement of others, and certainly not strangers in the street. When we define behavior as dangerous we say that if we didn’t do it we would be safe. And we give perpetrators an excuse. Telling someone not to wear a tight or low-cut top is the same as asking, “but what were you wearing?”

We need to stop trying to explain away sexual harassment. It’s wrong and people need to stop doing it. No matter where someone is walking, what they are wearing, and with whom they are walking. It is not their responsibility to behave differently to prevent harassment, it is the responsibility of harassers to stop harassing. Period. End of story.

Isha is a high school senior at La Jolla High School in San Diego, California. She is a local activist on various women’s issues, but particularly sexual harassment and assault. She has organized her high school’s sexual assault awareness campaigns as president and founder of La Jolla Girl Up.

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USA: Calling out “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing”

By

Connie DiSanto, New Hampshire, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Photo Credit: Lisa Dittman

Take Back the Night (TBTN) events have been held worldwide since the 1970s as a way for women to “take back” their right to walk safely at night, within their own communities. Earlier event participants were exclusively women but today, many include men as allies and survivors. Here at the University of New Hampshire, TBTN events date back to the 1990s and our program, the Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention (SHARPP) has, in various forms, sponsored and participated in TBTN events. This past fall was no exception.

Led by a handful of dedicated SHARPP peer advocates, some of whom are affiliated with sororities and fraternities on campus, a couple hundred students and a few staff members gathered to say that all forms of sexual violence and harassment and rape culture do not have a place on our campus. The group marched in solidarity in the dark and cold with hand-made signs with messages of strength and support for a safer campus. And at the end, the vigil brought forth brave survivors who spoke to the group.

We were proud of the student turnout and even happier that several fraternities had come out in support. However, our celebration of a successful event was cut short when a female student reached out and reported to our office that a group of male students from a particular fraternity was in fact, the opposite of what they presented themselves to be. Not in support. Not allies. Not true to the spirit of the event and all it stands for. Despite an initial plea from our student event leader who specifically asked the group to be respectful while participating in this event, these men mocked the true participants’ chants by shouting, “Assault is hot, consent is not” and engaged in sexually harassing comments to female students.

Reports were made about the incident to the Greek Life administration, the Dean of Students, and the Title IX office, resulting in disciplinary actions by Greek Life. University disciplinary action has not been communicated to our office to date. The students that came forward to report what had happened did everything they could in the moment. They confronted the individuals, pointing out that their behavior was unacceptable. It even prompted a male student among them to say, “You might want to watch what you say.” We applaud the students for coming forward to report the behavior at this event, knowing that they might be putting themselves in a vulnerable situation. Campuses need safe spaces for students to come forward and they need staff to support them and speak on their behalf.

As we de-briefed as a staff, we recognized this incident was not unique in itself since we’ve experienced similar behaviors among students through the years, but in this case, the brazen action taken by those students who were presenting themselves as “participants” was more than troubling. In a time when sexual violence and harassment on campus, and in all areas of society, is finally able to ‘come out of the dark’ and be discussed for what it is, an epidemic, we have to continue call out those individuals who feel they can walk among us, and make us feel unsafe and threatened.

#Metoo and The Silence Breakers have done more than reveal we are not alone as those impacted by sexual violence and harassment. It has given many people a voice and an opportunity to call out those individuals who assault and harass and make sure they know we see them for what they are. And as the new #TimesUp movement’s mission states: “No more silence. No more waiting. No more tolerance for discrimination, harassment or abuse.” The call for action is now.

Connie is the Marketing Communications Specialist for the Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP) at the University of New Hampshire. She can be reached at connie.disanto@unh.edu.

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Nigeria: Ending the Deafening Silence on Street Harassment

By

Adetayo Talabi, Lagos, Nigeria, SSH Blog Correspondent

“I was walking from my Ikeja Local Government office after my weekly community development service as a Youth Corp member when a young man between the age of 30-35 years walked close to me [and began talking]. I thought with his responsible look, I should hear him out, but then he asked if I was married and talked about how sexually appealing I look, [said] very irritating sexual words about my body shape, body features etc. I felt so embarrassed and angry. I had to increase my walking pace, but he kept walking faster and the disgusting words made me run…” (Itote)

“Someone grabbed my boobs. Another time, a man touched my face. Another time a man boldly told me that he wanted to give me oral sex on the street.” (Lu)

“It happened in school (University of Benin, Benin City, Edo State)… I had a rosette on my hair as I walked past the area where the young men were. One of them said I was trying to show to the world that I’ve been de-flowered, because of the rosette I had on my hair. I ignored them and kept walking.” (Oluwatobiloba)

“A male colleague once told me that if he took me into a room and touched me sexually, all my hidden features would come out.” (A. Oluwaseun)

“I was once walking home and some boys were saying, ‘Baby how are you?’ I ignored them and they called me a prostitute.” (Opeyemi)

These stories reflect the routine experience of women — not from India or the United States — but from Nigeria. They shared their experiences in an online survey I conducted about the prevalence of street harassment. I undertook this research because, in preparing to write on the topic, I discovered there was no existing study for my country. After I created the online survey, I shared it via Whatsapp groups; Facebook and Twitter while also encouraging close friends to take it and share it with their contacts.

What my survey showed is that street harassment is not peculiar to any country; in fact, it is part of  Nigerian women’s everyday live. From the seemingly innocent “hello” to vulgar, obscene suggestions, and in some cases outright threats of (sexual) assault, it is no easy task being a woman in Nigeria, especially in the major cities like Lagos, Abuja, and Port-Harcourt.

Out of 105 women who responded to my online survey, I found that about 92 of the women (88 percent) had experienced street harassment. Among them, 52 had been physically touched (50 percent) and 89 had been verbally harassed (85 percent). When I asked some men I found indulging in such despicable acts, they were quick to assert that their goal is simply to acknowledge and complement the qualities of the woman. On the other hand, some said that most women “ask” for the harassment by the way they dress. In response, I did not hesitate show them the Twitter post by Fauziyah.

There is no need denying the fact that street harassment dehumanizes women, by reducing them to sexual parts and functions, and it is an invasion of privacy which reminds the victims of their gender and vulnerability. It is also a dangerous public issue.

In Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, street harassment thrives. The city was recently named by Thomson Reuters as the eighth most dangerous megacity for women in the world. It was clear from the survey that the markets are particularly bad. One of my survey respondents, Oluwaseun, said she tries to mentally prepare for her visits because, according to her, “Every time I go to Yaba market, harassment is certain.”

Unlike in Nigeria, street harassment incidents are presently, openly and publicly being tackled in various countries in North and South America, Asia and Europe. I believe the fact that this issue is at the forefront of public discourse in these countries will mean that societal behaviour and attitudes on this issue will be changed in a fundamental way.

The same needs to occur in Nigeria. Nigerian women should have the inalienable, basic right not to be eve-teased, cat-called, groped or fondled against their will or be subjected to inappropriate comments based on their gender, be it on the street or in the workplace.

Given that women are overwhelmingly the victims of this assault, Nigerian women must be at the forefront of the push for change. Nigerian women should not isolate themselves from the trending global #MeToo movement but must take advantage of this and other anti-harassment initiative to make our country safe for everyone, irrespective of his or her gender.

But women should not have to work alone to stop street harassment. Nigerians, irrespective of their gender, as global citizens, need to individually take steps towards creating awareness about why street harassment is harmful and not allow it to continue to fester in the “public” shadows. Indeed, I agree with Olamide Abudu that it is ultimately up to all of us to come together to change the culture of pervasive harassment in Nigeria. As a nation, we need to do more than just sit and fold our arms in akimbo wishing the menace away; we need to work hard to get the discussion about street harassment started.

I believe this medium is just a starting point, but it should not end here. It begins with you, reading this piece.

Adetayo is a Judicial Assistant/Law Clerk to Justices of the Lagos Division of the Court of Appeals. He volunteers with several Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) that focus on legal aid, domestic/gender-based violence, gender equality and human rights. You can reach him by mail here or follow him on twitter at @TalabiJ_

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