Correspondent, Author at Stop Street Harassment

Spain: On Travelling Alone

May 26, 2015 By Correspondent

Rebecca Smyth, Spain, SSH Blog Correspondent

It is an immense pleasure and privilege to be able to travel, and it was all the more so in a country as wonderful as Portugal. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t bang on about Portugal all the time. I’m probably going to be That Person now. Sorry.

Travelling alone, and travelling alone as a woman, provides ample opportunity to think, untangle and unravel all sorts. So let’s dive in, shall we?

Street harassment seems to exist in a delightful array of regional variations. In Ireland I’ve found it’s mostly the drunken yelling, in Paris it was the stalking and propositioning on traffic islands, in Italy it’s, well, it’s pretty much everything you can think of – maybe they invented it? – and in Barcelona it’s mostly the good old-fashioned wolf whistle. In Portugal they seemed to be big fans of the lip smacking. LIP SMACKING. I wonder if they realise it makes them look like especially creepy orang-utans. I doubt they care. Their aim, whether they are conscious of it or not, is to re-assert their dominance of public space and of women moving through it.

Speaking of, I don’t think I’ll ever fully know just how much I limit myself and my movements because of my gender. I’ll never forget having a chat with a lovely guy I met on Erasmus. We were talking about how much we loved to wander the city. This is something that has a historical precedent, if you can believe it: flânerie. The French would have a word for it, wouldn’t they? I like to translate it to ‘flanning’ because it makes me imagine a flan happily bobbing about, probably humming to itself. And it totally wears a top hat and monocle.

But I digress. Flânerie became a thing in 19^th-century Paris and it’s bound up with the birth of the modern city and capitalism and stuff. Well worth reading about, honest. Significantly, those who flanned, les flâneurs, were wealthy young white men. What was their female counterpart? La flâneuse? Nope, the prostitute. Because a woman loitering or wandering aimlessly in public must be sexually available.

This is something I often reflect on as I flan about. And if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s to flan. For one thing, I keep moving as much as I can. I love to walk, and I love to walk about a new place and discover as much of it as I can, but that’s only part of it. The other, possibly bigger part of it is an awareness that I need to keep moving, because as soon as I sit down for whatever reason there is a significant likelihood that I will be on the receiving end of Unwanted Male Attention. Do any of you feel like that too?

One of the easier ways to combat this is to always have a book handy, although it is certainly not a failsafe measure. It worked really well in a restaurant my first evening in Porto though. I felt kind of bad about it – “Is this seat taken?” “Nope” *sits down expectantly* *I keep reading* *he shuffles on* *I eat my delicious dinner* *I leave*

This probably makes me sound like a big ol’ grump – Ah here Rebecca, what’s the harm in having a chat? Chats are great! Oh I know, I know. Striking up conversations, making small talk, bit of chit chat – I am a fan. Apparently as a toddler one of my catch phrases was, “What’ll we talk about now?” So interacting with other humans is not the issue.

The issue is I clearly want to be left alone but because I am out and about in public there is an assumption that I am desirous of your company, that you are entitled to my energy and focus and attention. And I’m not. Nothing personal, just having some alone time with a good book and a delicious pastry. Go away.

So that’s the first limit – I can’t loiter quite as much as perhaps I might like to. And when I do loiter, I need to at least look like I’m busy.

The second limit is the space itself. I am far from being alone in being safety-conscious, and I am acutely aware that as a straight, white, fully-able cisgender individual I don’t face half the limits far too many other people do in negotiating public space and their place in it. I probably don’t feel anywhere near as hemmed in and unsafe. But I have felt both those things when travelling. And it angers me that that’s the case, and that it’s exponentially worse for so many others.

The final limit, and in some ways the one that gets to me most and I don’t know why, is time. Back to Rémi (sound lad, hello if you’re reading) and our chat about wandering Paris. I can’t remember it word for word because it was three years ago, but I think we were talking about our favourite parts of Paris to wander about. He mentioned how atmospheric it is around Notre Dame at night.

“At night?!” I exclaimed. “Around what time?”
“Three, four in the morning.”
“And you’re not scared?”
“No, why would I be scared?”

I would be bricking it. Maybe I’m just especially nervy, but there is no way I would even wander my hometown alone at three in the morning. And I can’t tell you how much I yearn, how much I ACHE, to wander a big city late at night. But I know it’s just not a good idea. Because I’ve been told it and witnessed it enough to know that.

And look, I know in the great scheme of things there are much MUCH worse challenges facing women and other minority groups. And I care about those too, a great deal. But until the day any of us can walk out the door without feeling the need to take just those extra few precautions, even just in our heads, I don’t think we’ll ever really be free.

Rebecca is currently living, working and stumbling through ballet classes in Barcelona. Originally from Kilkenny, she has a degree in European Studies and a Master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and will be doing an LLM in Human Rights Law in Edinburgh this fall.

The Netherlands: Female Hitchhikers Defy Highway Harassment (Part 1)

May 21, 2015 By Correspondent

Julka Szymańska, the Netherlands, SSH Blog Correspondent

Hitchhiking: it’s as old as the road itself, but not everyone feels comfortable with the idea of hopping into a stranger’s vehicle for a ride. This may especially be true for women who are warned about the possibility of harassment or assault while hitchhiking. Yet hitchhiking still has its popularity and plenty of women are hitting the road with their thumb or a sign. So who are these women and why are they getting into a car with complete strangers?

Paulina.

Paulina is a brave 21 year old, born in Poland and currently living in Denmark. Two years ago she embarked on her first hitchhiking journey and ever since that first trip she has used most of her time off school to travel, contributing to her 20.000 kilometers on the road with her thumb. She wanted to see more of Europe’s many different cultures, but didn’t have much money, so hitchhiking was the perfect solution for this desire to explore.

Out of many positive experiences, she did encountered one negative situation: while hitchhiking with her friend in Georgia she was groped by a man after accepting his apparent hospitality. Fortunately they could get away by excusing themselves.

“Hitchhiking is more dangerous for women, women aren’t as physically strong and we risk rape too of course”, Paulina explains. “But i have pepper spray to keep myself safe and I use the ring my grandmother gave me as a fake engagement ring to communicate that I’m not looking for sex. ”She takes pride in being a rule breaker and doesn’t think too deeply about harassment: “If I start worrying about this, I could as well just stop hitchhiking and I don’t want that.”

Paulina’s golden tip for hitchhiking as a woman: “Be careful, but don’t stop traveling. Take a friend with you and you’ll gather memories you will never forget.”

Marjan.

Founder of Dutch hitchhiking foundation Nederland Lift, 36 year old Marjan is a mother of two and hitchhikes to work every Wednesday. She writes about these weekly 15-minute trips on her Dutch-language blog LiftGeluk.nl. After 124 rides in one and a half years Marjan is still hopelessly addicted to hitchhiking and the spontaneous, fun, and sometimes touching encounters she has along the way.

Marjan has never personally encountered any harassment during hitchhiking, but attributes this to the time of day and the short drive to her destination. She also acknowledges that there’s a world of difference between a confident 36 year old woman with plenty of experience and –for example– an unprepared 18 year old.

“An interesting aspect of hitchhiking is the anonymous, yet very real contact you make with people who you would otherwise not have a conversation with, this is unique,” Marjan proclaims. “Hitchhiking negates prejudice: you share a car with people of all walks of life. I believe this brings people closer together.”

Marjan speaks out against the bad reputation hitchhiking has due to harassment by explaining that people often blame hitchhiking, but not trains or buses, where it happens too. The harasser is responsible, not the method of transportation.

“Hitchhiking is a lot like life itself: you never know what comes your way, but it sure is beautiful”, is her motto.

Elisa.

Spanish Audio-Visual Communication student, feminist and acting aficionado Elisa just returned from traveling around the USA by finding rides through word of mouth networking and the Internet. This 23 year old, armed with her camera, overcame her insecurity of traveling alone by deciding to ‘just do it’ and isn’t planning on stopping any time soon.

Elisa is very clear in her convictions: “I believe that discouraging women to travel alone for fear of harassment can lead to victim-blaming. We live in a sexist society where women are told that we cannot do the same things a man can do without hearing ‘I told you so’ if something bad happens.” She wants to disprove that point by doing exactly what people say she can’t do: hitchhike and travel alone, regardless of harassment. “We should do something about harassment and empower women to not be stopped by fear, because otherwise it will paralyze us. I think the solution is to put tools (such as feminism) in the hands of both women and men to prevent harassment.”

Harassment happens in your own neighbourhood too, Elisa calls this ‘the enemy at home’, an enemy women are less prepared for when crossing their own street. “Being scared all the time is no way to live, but during hitchhiking it is something you have more control over.” Elisa carefully selects who to accept a ride from and writes down license plates: she’s aware of the risks and has trust in herself and others.

Stay tuned for the second part of this series next month.

Julka is a 25-year-old feminist activist and soon-to-be Cultural Science student with a generous amount of life experiences -including street harassment – and even more passion for social justice.

USA: School is a (un)safe place

May 20, 2015 By Correspondent

Laura Voth, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Artwork by a high school student in Virginia.

I am twelve years old, walking down the locker-lined hallway of my middle school on the way to the bathroom. The corridor is empty but for two or three eighth-graders loitering outside of a classroom. As I walk by, one of the boys, a red-head, calls out “where you going, pretty girl?” He bares his teeth and narrows his eyes at me, giving a poor imitation of a smile.

I give the boy my fiercest glare and continue on to the bathroom, looking back once to make sure he isn’t following me. As I wash my hands and return to class—taking care to go a different route to avoid running in to the redhead—I think about what has just happened. Surely I shouldn’t feel so upset; a boy called me pretty. Isn’t that a compliment?

At the time, I couldn’t describe why I felt dirty and disgusted by what had happened, and for years afterwards I was still confused. Why did such a seemingly-innocent phrase make my stomach turn? Why did I feel nervous every time I saw that boy in the hallway or at an assembly? I didn’t even know his name—and to this day I still don’t—but that boy made me feel unsafe in an environment that ought to have been something of a haven. More than that, his words made me feel as though I didn’t deserve to be comfortable at school.

I still wonder today what that boy was thinking—why he would choose to make that comment and why it would even occur to him to say it. It’s true that fourteen-year-olds aren’t great at making wise decisions, but this wasn’t an impersonal, largely harmless action. I still remember the look in his eyes and the timbre of his voice—I believe that he knew the impact of what he was saying.

I wonder where that boy learned to call upon women in passing as though he had a right to comment on them. I wonder whether he saw his father or brothers doing it. Maybe he saw it in a music video or a TV show. Maybe he legitimately thought that his comment was a good way to get some positive attention from a girl.

When I tell this story of the first time I experienced street harassment, the listener sometimes indicates that I’ve made a mountain out of a molehill, that the boy’s comment was harmless, and that I ought to let it go (although perhaps I should). But how can someone forget the first time they felt that their personal safety was in immediate danger? I remember that moment as the point when I realized that those around me considered my body fair game for public scrutiny; that my body was not truly my own.

For many women, street harassment starts around puberty, with 90% of women experiencing it before the age of nineteen. Harassment sends a message that the victim doesn’t deserve to feel safe in her environment and that she is not worthy of simply moving through her world without a crude comment tossed her way.

It’s no wonder that girls’ confidence seems to drain away as they emerge into adolescence. With men and boys harassing them at school and in their very own neighborhoods, how can girls be expected to assert themselves in other situations? After all, if they can’t feel safe even moving through their world, venturing outside of their comfort zone—socially, academically, emotionally—becomes an even greater risk. If a thirteen-year-old isn’t able to walk down the street without being catcalled, she won’t explore avenues unfamiliar to her.

Those of us who began experiencing harassment at young ages—and I know there are many who were first harassed younger than I was—need to nurture the girl who still believes she is undeserving of safety and respect. Explain what happened like you would to a niece or a daughter: remind yourself that you are worthy of feeling comfortable in your environment and that nobody has the right to take away your peace of mind.

If I could go back to that day in the middle school hallway as an adult, I’d ask the red-headed boy what he thought gave him the right to accost a girl who was doing nothing more than existing in a public space. I would tell him the impact that his comments can have on a woman—that the women he harasses will likely remember his words for years to come (and may even write articles describing their negative experiences with him).

I would tell that red-headed boy that his actions are neither respectful nor attractive and that no woman has ever thought “damn, I’d love to go out with that guy who catcalled me today.” I’d tell him that the words he says to women in the street are not indicative of his power, but rather of his inability to see women as human beings.

I’d tell him that, while the girl he just catcalled has no idea what to say to him and only knows that she feels confused and violated, he is the one that should be ashamed.

I’d ask him whether his comment was worth the momentary swagger; whether he truly deserved the brief ego-boost more than I deserved to feel safe at school—safe to walk through the halls, safe to make my voice heard, safe to explore my world.

Laura is an emerging adult-slash-college student studying to enter a healthcare profession. In addition to studying and writing, Laura works at her university’s women’s center where she helps design and implement programs on all things lady.

USA: Poetry and Street Harassment

May 19, 2015 By Correspondent

Michelle Marie Ryder, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Despite her themes of feminism, there is no Sylvia Plath poem about street harassment. If you type “street harassment” into the search bar at two of the largest poetry databases (The Poetry Foundation and poets.org) you’ll get zero results. Type in “trees” or “love” and you’ll find hundreds or thousands of matching results.

It appears as if street harassment is not the subject of poetry. Which isn’t surprising, considering how historically male-dominated the literary world has been. Just like public space, cultural circles and high centers of learning are long-established male domains. Only within recent memory have women experienced some success in forcing the doors open, demanding a ‘room of their own’ in the literary world.

Still, I don’t think I ever expected to find a poem about street harassment by Sylvia Plath, despite the regularity in which her name surfaced when I talked to people about the subject. As both a literary giant and a feminist icon, I understood why Plath came to mind. But the dots, easy to connect, were still too few.

In truth, only very recently are enough dots beginning to appear and fuse intelligibly to bring the bigger picture into view. Thanks to our ability to disseminate our stories through modern technology, women from all ranks of society are speaking up and being heard, exposing the bigger picture of street harassment for what it really is: “a pattern of violence that constitutes a genuine social crisis,” writes Rebecca Solnit.

Despite the lack of search results at some popular websites, the poetic imagination is alive and flourishing. Survivors of street harassment are fighting back and sharing their experiences through the poetic medium. They are using poetry as a powerful tool to develop a vocabulary of dissent against gendered oppression in the public sphere. Surging with raw poetic insight and justified rage, these poets are transforming the streets by changing minds.

Being the digital age, this conversation is happening mostly online, on personal websites and social media platforms, among career artists and activists and ordinary folks alike. And because of its grassroots nature, it is expanding beyond the limited reaches of the white, cis, middle class female experience in order to embrace the experiences of the LGBTQIA community, lower-income people, people of color, and people with disabilities. Anyone who is not a wealthy, straight, white man is likely to endure public harassment at some point in their life.

Perhaps what’s most fascinating about this burgeoning genre of poetry is that it is dominated by spoken word: “performance-based poetry that focuses on the aesthetics of word-play and storytelling” (Wikipedia). This is in part because the literary establishment has yet to take street harassment as a subject of poetry seriously, but also – and more importantly – because spoken word is a natural fit.

Rooted in the oral tradition, spoken word has long served as a powerful vehicle for voicing dissent and agitating for social change. Poetry about street harassment is about moving beyond the individualistic poetic pursuit. It is about translating painful, self-aware moments into something larger, pushing poetic self-expression to answer to larger political realities in order to create a wider community consciousness – i.e. a movement.

It is about practicing freedom, even if we don’t have it yet. Change can and does start with a poem, even if your voice trembles. And now is the time to speak up. Visibility of the issue is at an all time high. The term “street harassment” has finally entered the popular lexicon thanks to the hard work of countless organizations and individuals.

Sylvia Plath may never have written a poem about street harassment, but it would be disingenuous of me to leave you with the impression that she was silent on the issue. She wasn’t. She suffered too, as much from the problem itself as from her own radical understanding of it, writing in her journal:

“My consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be a part of a scene… all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”

The limitations patriarchy placed on Plath’s life were obvious and unwelcome; catcalls, sexual solicitations and the underlying threat of assault policed her existence.

If street harassment is the shrinking of one’s world, poetry is its opposite.

Michelle is a freelance writer and community activist. She has written for Infita7.com, Bluestockings Magazine, and The New Verse News on a range of social justice issues, and shares her poetry regularly at poetrywho.blogspot.com.

UK: This is why street harassment violates human rights

May 11, 2015 By Correspondent

Ruth Mair, UK, SSH Blog Correspondent

When I first browsed around the SSH site for some ideas on what had and had-not been written about by others so far, one of the things that struck me was that in the information about the origins of the Stop Street Harassment project, street harassment was referred to as a human rights issue.

As a human rights student, my first inclination was to agree: of course street harassment is a human rights issue. But I am also the first to admit that although I vehemently oppose street harassment, I had not thought of it in terms of human rights violations before. And when I tried to unpack this, to myself, in my head I had trouble thinking about how I would explain it to someone else, particularly if that someone had never experienced street harassment, or had perhaps never seen it taking place.

So I thought that for my first blog as one of the SSH Summer Correspondents, I would put together a check-list of sorts, in case you are ever faced with trying to explain to someone why street harassment is a human rights issue. Then you can shout it at anyone (should you wish to) who suggests that street harassment is just a women’s issue, or worse, just banter.

First, the human rights aspects of street harassment can be broken in to two realms of violation. The first is that street harassment literally infringes on the human dignity of the person being harassed, and seriously affects their ability to live their life as they wish to. Preservation of human dignity is one of the key aims of instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and street harassment in all its forms violates one’s ability to live in the world with equal dignity to that of other people who are not generally harassed (e.g. women who are harassed when men are not, or transgender people who are harassed when cis people are not, or people of colour who are harassed in ways that white people are not etc). This would be the case regardless of which groups are most vulnerable to being harassed. In the language of rights violations, human dignity is incredibly important, and street harassment can be extremely detrimental to an individual’s sense of personal dignity.

Secondly, there is very little authoritative or legal framework from which governments are able to prevent harassment, or hold those who harass others accountable for their actions. This is also illustrative of a rights violation, because it reflects an institutionalised vulnerability of those who are most often the victims of street harassment. There are laws against bullying in the workplace generally, and laws specifically against harassment of women in the workplace, for example, but not to address the problem of harassment in the streets. As a wise woman one said (or perhaps typed), just because we move through a public space, does not mean that our bodies are public spaces. The lack of framework to address violations in public spaces also reflects a gap in rights protection, regardless of the reasons behind this specific gap (funding, difficulties of enforcement etc) which represent a whole other sphere of problems in rights protection generally.

In terms of the specific articles of rights that are relevant to the problem of street harassment, much of the time this will depend on the context and circumstances of the harassment taking place, however some rights will often apply in a general sense, to any form of street harassment. The first is the right to a private life. This is embodied in article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and states that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy. Although this is intended to apply to instances of the government interfering with private life, it can also be used to refer to examples of harassment where the government are unable or unwilling to uphold and actively protect that right.

Similarly, the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is significant; attending public events is peaceful assembly, and harassment violates that both by removing the safety to attend, and by removing the “peaceful” part of things, which can thus be seen as a violation of that right. The rights embodied in CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, are also helpful here, as they refer to the specifically gendered side of interaction with the public sphere, and the inherent dangers that face those who are not cis males when interacting with the public generally. CEDAW sets out to create legislation for the purpose of guaranteeing women the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men, and in ignoring the problem of street harassment for women, states party to CEDAW are inherently violating this, if only by an act of ignorance rather than malice.

In my opinion, these rights easily make street harassment an issue worthy of much more attention at a government level, but for now they should at least give you an edge when anyone attempts to suggest that street harassment is a problem that does not need talking about.

Ruth is a human rights MA student finishing her MA dissertation on the legal and normative rights of terror suspects in the UK (spoiler alert: rights are being violated). She also plays bass in a band called Kinshot, sews as often as she can, and spends time getting annoyed at the cat sleeping on top of her computer.

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