One of the most common “arguments” I hear when it comes to street harassment is that it wouldn’t happen if women didn’t dress “a certain way.” When I give talks, I specifically point out studies that refute this, such as how in Yemen more than 90 percent of women experience street harassment, yet women are very modestly dressed, if not completely covered, when they are in public places.
Last year Ghaidaa Al Absi launched The Safe Streets campaign to address the problem of street harassment in Yemen and they just released a video about the issue.
It’s in Arabic and even if you don’t know the language, the opening powerfully shows how street harassment is not about what women wear. The video also brings up the complicated contexts for street harassment: sometimes a street harasser is a harassment victim too, but he is harassed for different reasons. Can pointing out the parallels of harassment to harassers help stop the cycle?
Al Absi sent me the following via email about the campaign and video:
“Safe Streets Campaign for anti-sexual harassment in the streets launches the opening ceremony of broadcasting a short movie called “Safe Streets” that is done as an activity for the campaign aims to reduce the rate of sexual harassment in the Yemeni streets.
The campaign aims to monitor cases of harassment and encourage community and women in particular to break the silence, and talk about what is happening to them on the streets in order to put pressure on decision makers to declare solutions of this serious social problem.
This short movie aims to present the problem of sexual harassment, that many Yemeni women are facing it in their daily life in the streets, and how the harasser of the woman can be a victim of harassment in the street too, so then he can understand how women feel.”
