Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Romania: Street harassment in rural Romania

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Simona-Maria Chirciu, Bucharest, Romania, SSH Blog Correspondent

Photo by the author

I want to share with you all one of my experiences of street harassment. It was so awful and terrifying. I was in the village where I grew up and where I used to go and relax in the summer. Is a small village with a predominantly older population. There are some teenager and people in their 20’s and only about 12 children.

I was walking down the rural road on my way to my grandma’s house. It was dark, because in some Romanian villages the light goes on after 10 p.m. Four boys where following me that night but I didn’t see them and I didn’t care about that. I was in a bad mood that night and I did not respond to their catcalling me and leering at me when I was passing by.

When I got back from my grandma’s house and I was going to my uncle’s house, not so far from her house, those guys started to throw rocks at me. It was very dark, I had my hands full with apples, a big bottle of honey and my mobile phone as I was on the phone with my boyfriend. I managed to avoid being hit, but I yelled at them that I’m not scared of them. Then they started to walk behind me, so I stopped and let them pass, to let them be in front of me because  then I felt safer. But I was wrong! They laughed and tried to intimidate me. I was so nervous; a feminist and activist feeling unsafe and vulnerable in front of those guys!

Most of the time when I get catcalled I respond and I wanted to do that then too! My boy friend heard all of the discussion and tried to calm me down, demanding me to let them be and to stay quiet. But I was furious! This wasn’t the first time I was harassed in my village. I didn’t even know them so why were they acting like this toward me? I felt the urge to respond back! So I started acting fiercely, saying that I don’t fear them and that they are just some dumb harassers. One of them got nervous and started threating me, saying to shut up. I didn’t want to shut up. Why for?

He approach me and threatened me again. So I screamed out in his face that I’m not afraid. So immediately he punched me very hard in the face. Twice! I tried to fight back, but my hands were full. So he pulled my hair in a very brutal manner that I felt my cervical spine snapped. Then he put me on the ground and punched me in the face and the head. Then he and his friends left… while I was laying there, in acute pain. But I didn’t want to feel a victim so I managed to get up, to grab my telephone and other things and I faked that I was calling the Police. They heard and started running. Nobody heard my scream even though people from rural Romania are so curious and always behind the fences, looking on the street to see what’s happening and the next day to gossip about it. But when it comes to violence against women, they do not care!

After a short time, Police came and said to me: “Come on miss, stop crying, it’s not so bad, you’re overreacting!”

I had a swollen cheek and blood came out of my mouth, my hair was damaged. I was in shock! They blamed me for that incident. The officers heard all of my declarations and the guy that hit me, fled. When I confronted the Policeman he said and did nothing about it. Moreover he said the one that hit me me has mental disabilities and he can’t be punished and that he beats his mother and harasses other women too. And because I am not from that village, the Policeman said the declaration has no value if I want to press charges and I can’t come back here every month. For one week my cervical spine was all swollen and sore. I didn’t manage to move my head even an inch. Everybody in my family said to me that was my fault, a girl must never argue with a guy and why I was wandering in the village after dark? Why couldn’t I just mind my own business? Ohhh! All this discourse discouraged me so I didn’t continue with the Police complaint.

Even now, two years after the incident, sometimes my head hurts in those places where I was hit and once more I get terrified when I remember the hate in his eyes towards me. The very cherry on top was that a few weeks from that incident an unknown mobile phone number sent me messages like “I know you! How are you, you sweet girl” and then called me.. It was a familiar voice: it was that Policeman from my village, the one that took my declaration and said to me that I was overreacting! I threatened to report him and he stopped, but still I was petrified that he did this!

This experience gave me the motivation to fight harder against street harassment. Harassers don’t stop easily, so we keep on fighting!!

Simona is the Vice President of a feminist NGO – FILIA Center and a PhD student in Political Sciences, working on a thesis on street harassment in Bucharest. You can follow her on Facebook.

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Collaboration with Lyft

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Lyft connects people who need a ride with trained community drivers. Along with Collective Action for Safe Spaces and Hollaback!, next month SSH will be collaborating with Lyft on creating sexual harassment training videos for their drivers. They are also joining the White House It’s On Us campaign to address sexual violence. We are thrilled that Lyft is prioritizing this issue and committing to creating safer vehicles for passengers and drivers alike.

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SSH in Tucson and Toronto

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This week, SSH board member Manuel Abril distributed SSH materials in Tucson at an important conference. From Manuel:

“The Annual Youth and Peace Conference (YPC) is a unique Tucson event empowering youth to become courageous leaders and creative peace builders in our community. Youth violence is still considered by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to be an epidemic problem in America. Arizona’s youth violence and homicide rates are higher than the national average. I am an organizer of the Peace Conference but used my presence at the event to promote Stop Street Harassment’s mission as street harassment is often a young person’s introduction to the violence of public space. Public space is also the stage in which youth are called upon to internalize and enact their own marginalization when they curb or constrain their own movement to be safe.”

In mid-February, I spoke to a packed room at Centennial College in Toronto. Afterward, students could write pro-respect, anti-harassment messages on a poster for their campus.

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USA: Wednesday Addams and Street Harassment

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Tyler Bradley, Michigan, USA Blog Correspondent

YouTube star Melissa Hunter is an online sensation, with 186,000 subscribers, and her biggest hit video reached the digital viewing screens of more than 2.25 million, just last week. This video hits the point home on catcalling by examining what an adult Wednesday Addams would do.

This series features many comedic videos, several hinting at women’s issues, tackling reproductive rights, one night stands, and internet dating, but nothing has been so direct in terms of activism as the street harassment video.

This sketch demonstrates how Hunter visualizes Addams Family character Wednesday would respond to street harassment.

In this video, two stereotypical dudebros call at her, “You’d look a lot prettier if you smile,” and obscene phrases.

Then Wednesday Addams appears at the home of the two catcallers to confront them. At first, the two are convinced she has come to repay the compliment in a consensual way, but she has something else up her black Victorian-age sleeves.

Wednesday brings in three of her most masculine and muscular friends — not to physically harm them, but to compliment the harassers all day long.

The men engage in ironic conversation, twisting their actions against them. “They’re not welcome in our house,” they rant, expressing their concern that the compliments are unwanted and a form of harassment.

After the harassers threaten to call the cops, Wednesday tells them, “Most forms of verbal assault on public property are perfectly legal – isn’t that just twisted?”

She nails the coffin with her last quote, “Cheer up. You’d be prettier if you smiled.”

Similar to social experiments like “When did you choose to be straight?”,  Adult Wednesday Addams reverses their argument by using their excuses against them.

Fighting fire with fire against sexual harassment by gender role reversion usually results in reinforcing gender stereotypes, like Buzzfeed’s “If Women Catcalled Men” or Funface’s “Women Catcalling Guys.” Hunter avoids this by not showing the different unwanted compliments her three friends would have said, with the exception of the heavy breathing by Bob.

It may alienate the male audience by depicting such a stereotypical hyper-masculine duo, making them less relatable to those participating in the institutional harassing culture. But, I don’t think Hunter should be too concerned. Creating parodies of fictional characters with strong cult followings can push the extremes of how viral a message can go, and this is just what Hunter has done.

Buzzfeed Video recently proved this is successful after releasing a strong feminist piece by creating a social justice parody of Harry Potter from Hermione’s perspective. They also address catcalling in this video, by the way. This video, much like Hunter’s, increases the viral state of a video, just by incorporating fictional figures with cult followings.

The lesson we’ve learned from Hunter is that popular culture is an excellent venue of advocacy and activism. They offer relatability in terms of massive followings, they’re comedic, and they help advance under-recognized causes.

Thank you, Melissa Hunter, and let’s hope you bring more of your third wave feminism to your future uploads!

Tyler is a senior majoring in graphic design at Saginaw Valley State University and plans to undertake a graduate program in higher education in the fall. Follow Tyler on Twitter, @MysteriousLuigi.

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“I was afraid of being ignored or laughed at”

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I was walking from Brixton Market to Brixton Road on a busy Friday at 8 p.m. I didn’t feel at risk because there were a lot of people around and I was walking along a well-lit street with shops.

As I was walking through the scaffolding which is currently lining part of Coldharbour Lane (which has the bad effect of cutting the path off from the rest of the street and giving it an alleyway-like effect) I noticed a man coming towards me. As I say, I had no suspicion or fear as, fortunately, I am accustomed to walking past men without adverse consequences. However as we walked past each other this squat man in his forties or fifties stuck his hand out and gave my ass a good squeeze. Unlike me, he had noticed that for a few seconds we were the only people in the street, and had taken advantage of the fact. I was so shocked and scared by his action and by how vulnerable I suddenly felt that I carried on walking (towards the main road) and only shouted some insults back at him.

A big group of people came round the corner straight after, and I considered telling them, because the man was still just walking casually along the road ahead. But I was afraid that they might laugh or refuse to do anything, and so add further to my humiliation.

I think it could be helpful to have posters in the street, encouraging people to take action against this kind of event – perhaps saying something like ‘GROPING AND VERBAL HARASSMENT ARE A CRIME AND ARE PUNISHABLE BY A FINE OF £— OR JAIL. PLEASE REPORT THIS CRIME TO THE POLICE AND HELP US CATCH THE CRIMINALS WHO DO THIS.’ If I had been sure that this is universally considered to be unacceptable and illegal, then I would have said something and perhaps they could have helped me to punish, shame or take the man to the police. Instead, I was afraid of being ignored or laughed at.

It is absolutely disgusting that some people feel like they can walk around taking whatever they want. Someone whose morals are so low as to enable them to touch a woman and take advantage of her vulnerability are surely not above rape. They should be dealt with as seriously as criminals, to clearly put out the message that ANY TYPE of unwanted sexual act is absolutely unacceptable.

– Anonymous

Location: Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, London, United Kingdom

Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea

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