Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Billboards against Rape Culture in Lancaster, PA

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Photo by Mark Hutchens

UPDATED: Here is the Ms Magazine article about the billboards. It was syndicated on Care2’s site.

Yesterday I had the privilege to meet Ray and Adele, the co-directors of hu_MAN Up, in Lancaster, PA. They’ve been involved in a number of efforts to challenge rape culture with their latest being three electronic billboard messages near the Franklin & Marshall campus. This is the one about street harassment. They’re determined to not just preach to the choir when it comes to these kinds of messages and hope that their billboard messages are reaching a lot of people who may not otherwise hear about rape culture or the need for consent and respect.

I’m writing an article about their billboards for Ms Magazine’s blog this week, so stay tuned.

They just received their 501c3 status and are fundraising to be able to do ads on buses and more billboard messages. Donate if you can!

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USA: Decreasing harassment and increasing resiliency

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Kirstin Kelly, Monterey, California, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

About a month ago, University of Tennessee researchers Dawn Syzmanski and Chandra Feltman published an article entitled “Helping Women Overcome the Anguish of Unwanted Sexual Advances.” The article professes that women who experience street harassment fall into two major categories: those who are resilient and those who are not. Immediately after publication, Syzmanski and Feltman faced backlash from people who felt the article was supporting victim-blaming mentalities by suggesting that people who are more resilient are better able to cope with the stress of unwanted sexual advances than people who are not.

Normally, I agree with people who caution against products or research that could perpetuate victim blaming because I, like most others, believe that pressuring those engaged in harassing behaviors is far more important than teaching would-be-victims to avoid responsibility. I fully agree that the onus of responsibility should be on the aggressors, not their victims. But this study is fundamentally different to me.

First, the idea of resiliency is widely accepted among psychologists as a way of understanding why certain people respond to stressors by using them as springboards while others experience overwhelming negativity as a result of the same type of occurrence.

Second, victim blaming usually refers to advice or products to help would-be-victims avoid situations that might lead to harassment or even assault. These are obviously problematic because they place the onus of responsibility on the victims to avoid situations in the first place, but ignore the reality that harassment and assault can happen to anyone at any time in any place under any circumstances.

Resiliency could be a useful tool in helping to combat the effects of street harassment because it helps survivors heal from trauma, which could include unwanted sexual advances, but it is victim blaming to suggest that people who lack resiliency will have a harder time. Similarly, since resiliency can be helpful in healing from a number of different traumas, it is not asking potential victims to alter their behavior in order to avoid negative situations.

There is nothing victims can do to keep themselves completely safe, but aggressors have the ability to stop their behavior. Social pressure definitely needs to be placed on the aggressors to stop the behavior, but in the meantime, research that helps us understand how victims can recover from their experiences is valuable. I think it’s helpful to encourage people to increase their resiliency regardless of their perceived susceptibility to aggressive behavior. Likewise, I think aggressors should be discouraged from continuing together.

Perhaps these two approaches work best when combined as a holistic approach to addressing rape culture and street harassment.

Kirstin is a Master’s Student in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and a news editor at the Women’s International Perspective (The WIP). You can follower her on Twitter at @KirstinKelley1, where she regularly posts about human rights issues around the world.

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When Street Harassers Put You in a Hospital

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“‘At Notting Hill Carnival yesterday a man in the crowd grabbed my arse. When I told him not to he did it again. I pushed him away, exercising my right to tell a man to stop touching my body without my permission, so he took a swing at me and punched me in the face…

A woman should be able to leave the house without fear of being sexually assaulted. And she should be able to defend herself without being put in hospital.” – Mary Brandon in the UK.

She was in the hospital for 9 hours after the attack. Read more here.

One of the many reasons why we need to pay attention to street harassment and not just dismiss it as a compliment, no big deal, or, as Fox News recently said, “let men be men” is that it can escalate into something worse. Particularly if the men don’t like women’s responses to their harassment.

I saw this when I conducted focus groups for the SSH national study. For example, in Brooklyn two women shared scary retaliation stories. One said, “I’ve seen a guy knock a girl’s head into a brick wall that she was leaning on behind them because she did not want to talk to him. She was gushing blood. It’s unacceptable.” Another woman said, “My cousin’s friend got shot in the back as she walked away because she didn’t want to talk to the guy.”

We saw this recently too when a man in Philadelphia told harassers to watch what they were saying to the women and one got out of his vehicle and punched him. He hit his head on concrete and went unconscious and had to be hospitalized.

It’s past time to start taking this seriously.

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“I was beginning to panic”

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I was waiting for the tram and I notice a 60-year-old man in the nearby staring at me. He made me feel very uncomfortable and I walked away from him and continued waiting. The guy continued staring at me with fixed eyes, and then came to me. He placed himself right in front of me, less than half a meter away and stared me from head to feet stopping at my breasts and legs.

I was beginning to panic, so I reached for my cell phone and called. At that moment the guy went away from the tram station.

Optional: Do you have any suggestions for dealing with harassers and/or ending street harassment in general?

Education: many people (both men and women) think that is not a problem to look at or even to say something “nice” to a woman you don’t know at all, when she’s just minding her own business. Some people even consider it a nice thing to do, because they are “complimenting” you. I wonder how would they feel if they were given back an assessment of their own physicality.

– Anonymous

Location: Leipzig, Germany

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

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“There weren’t any more inappropriate shouts from them that afternoon”

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Someone was hollering harassment at female athletes on the West Drive in Central Park. This time it sounded like it was coming from a male so young his voice hadn’t changed yet. A glance over the shoulder showed a group of seven boys on bicycles. They looked the right age for Junior High School.

Their leader had already developed the intuition for picking out unaccompanied women. There are just a few seconds to choose a course of action when someone comments on the body of every woman he sees. On a less crowded day it would have been possible to speed up and avoid them. Rolling the eyes in exasperation was a valid option: I was twenty-six and these kids were twelve or maybe thirteen. Really, does one have to put up with this from children?

Instead I slacked pace just a little. Sure enough, the little alpha wolf-pup comments about my butt. When he catches up I turn to looked him in the eye and answered, “Girls don’t like it when you talk to them that way.”

“Uh-oh!” a couple of his friends exclaimed. They expected a challenge. They’ve heard put-downs and curses before.

Instead they hear something they weren’t prepared for. The thought in my head at that instant was maybe the grown men who had made street harassment a habit could have been reached at some point when they were young. So I used a regular voice, one human being to another: “You see men talk that way, but they aren’t getting anywhere are they?” His friends fell silent.

He was listening so I continued. “If you think a girl is pretty just talk to her like a regular person. Say hello, start a conversation. You’ll do a lot better that way.”

The mask of bravado had completely fallen off his face. He was thinking about the grown men he had been imitating. “Then why do they do that?”

“They don’t know any better. The ones who act that way are kind of dumb.”

One boy called out from the back of the pack. “Yeah, it’s a dumb thing to do.”

The leader studied my face, then in a quieter voice replied, “Thanks.” I smiled back but he probably didn’t see. He was already slacking his pace. His group fell behind as I continued to work out. There weren’t any more inappropriate shouts from them that afternoon.

– Lise

Location: La Mesa, California

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

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