Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

“That’s what I’m talking about”

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I was cutting through the courtyard of the building I work at this morning, and from the outdoor elevator tower I hear “Mmm-mmm-mmm!” and “That’s what I’m talking about.”

I look in the direction of where it was coming from and see an older man, old enough to be my father, peeking from one side of the tower, dressed in the blue uniform of the workers that service our building.

I look again and then he’s peeking from the other side of the tower. Then he says “Hello.” Instead of returning his “hello,” I called him “strange.”

Since I believe he’s one of the workers that do maintenance for my office building, I think he’d be fairly easy to track down and report. I hope so.

– anonymous

Location: Georgetown area, Washington, DC

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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The person you said ‘Hey Baby’ to is a lesbian

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Yesterday I was excited to read about the first same-sex couple marrying in Washington, DC. Equal rights for all! What I didn’t notice in the Washington Post article I read was the mention of street harassment until my partner pointed it out.

“A man [Angelisa] Young sees almost every day, who normally greets her with a jokingly flirtatious ‘Hey, baby!’ was conspicuously silent when she saw him the day after the courthouse. She wanted to tell him, ‘Believe it or not, the person you said ‘Hey, baby’ to on March 2 was also a lesbian with a partner.”

I’m really glad she mentioned this (and that my partner pointed it out). The differing impact street harassment has on LBQT women compared to heterosexual ciswomen is an important topic that is rarely talked about.

Men still proposition and sexually harass women who appear to be heterosexual, even if they are not. This is the epitome of heterosexual male privilege: assuming every woman he sees on the street is single, heterosexual or bisexual, and interested in his attention. This assumption wholly denies the sexual identity of women who are not.  While many, even most, heterosexual and bisexual women want nothing to do with the men who approach them on the street, women who have no sexual interest in men especially do not. Male harassers do not give women that choice.

Scholar Tiffanie Heben wrote in her article “A Radical Reshaping of the Law: Interpreting and Remedying Street Harassment” how street harassment by a man who interprets a woman to be heterosexual can function to deny the woman of her sexual identity. His actions remind her that her true sexual identity is a “deviance” from the sexual orientation norm he is projecting onto her. She may also be frightened because she fears that if he finds out her sexual orientation he will become violent.

Meanwhile, women who do not appear to be heterosexual or who do not conform to their birth sex (such as transwomen) can be harassed for that reason, often with hateful violence and threats. Gary David Comstock, a professor of religion at Wesleyan University, studied violence against lesbian and gay people and found that 86 percent of the openly lesbian women he surveyed had been the victims of anti-lesbian verbal harassment as a result of their sexual orientation. More women of color than white women reported such harassment.

I cover this topic more in my forthcoming book.

Thoughts or stories from readers about how sexual orientation and gender expression impacts gender-based street harassment?

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Yuck! Harassers in a Truck!

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I was walking back to work, enjoying the weather, enjoying the freebies I got from Georgetown Cupcake and from a girl on the street handing out free Ghirardelli chocolates, and these fools had to ruin it!

Out of nowhere, I hear “Yo, gorgeous!” and I turn in the direction where it came from. I see these two losers in a red and yellow truck smirking at me. Gross.

The truck pulls up further in traffic, and I catch up to it and snap a photo with my phone. I wish it’d came out clearer so you could see their faces, but at least the company name is somewhat visible.

When I told them that they needed to do their jobs and not hit on women, they didn’t care. They continued to smirk and giggle. Passers-by made a comment about me and giggled, and I don’t know if they were laughing at me getting harassed or laughing at me giving the harassers an earful, but I just didn’t care. I felt like these harassers just ruined what was a good afternoon.

The license plate on this truck was a Maryland plate, 11K 394. I saw that it said “Joy” on the side of the truck and got part of the truck’s phone number, 800-992-, but I couldn’t catch the last four digits. Google searches yielded nothing close.

I hope the employer sees this photo of this truck online, and reprimands these punks for hitting on women while they’re on the clock. It’s so disgusting.

– Anonymous

Location: M St & Wisconsin Ave, Washington, DC

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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I’m Not Your Tasty Doughnut!

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So my number finally came up. I phoned in last night and had to report for jury duty this morning. The court house is a mile and a half away from where I live. Spring has come to NYC so I decided last night I would walk rather than pay for a cab. I dressed in a skirt and blazer and dress shoes and knee length black leggings. I am eternally late. I was this morning. But I still didn’t want to take a cab, so with backpack full of laptop and reading materials I headed out onto the street in the warm morning sunshine and ran the mile and a half to the court house.

I got honked at twice. A man walking toward me, paused and looked me up and down like I was a tasty doughnut. On one busy corner the talk and hum and conversations of a group of day workers halted as I ran past them, all of them staring at me like I was a moving parade.

Yes, I was unusual–a woman dressed in a suit, carrying a large backpack and running down a city street. But I tried to think of a man, perhaps my husband dressed in his business suit, carrying a briefcase, running down the same streets. Would women driving by honk at him? Would women on the street that he ran past look him up and down like he was breakfast? Would women gathered at a corner stop their talk and stare at him simply because he was running by?

I am sorry to say that when the second person honked at me when I was only steps away from the court house, I did something I have only done once before in my 51 years of life. I lifted my third finger at the car.

I am so tired of men thinking that this behavior is okay. But was I shocked or surprised. No. Sadly its what I expect.

– Beckie

Location: Queens, New York

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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Watching Egypt

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I’ve never been to Egypt, but I have been fascinated by it ever since the sixth grade when we spent a substantial part of social studies learning about ancient Egypt. Today it’s more than the pyramids and the Nile which capture my interest. Each day I scan the news to see if there are any new developments regarding street harassment activism and legislation there.

The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights (ECWR) has made street harassment, or public sexual harassment, as they refer to it, one of their central activism issues. As we talk about equal rights on an international level for International Women’s Day, I can think of no group I’d rather highlight than them.

Women never will achieve equal rights until they can access public places free of harassment and assault. Because of the tireless work of the ECWR, the Egyptian Parliament is considering new legislation that would ban sexual harassment at work, in public, online, and through mobile devices. This is groundbreaking legislation that will help change the cultural acceptance of harassment, deter the behavior, and give women recourse. I am eagerly waiting to see if it will pass. If/when it does, I hope it can serve as a model for the U.S. and other countries to follow.

How did the ECWR get to this point?

Because of the sharp increase in the number of women sharing their experiences with public harassment and a lack of societal awareness of the problem, in 2005 the ECWR launched an anti-sexual harassment campaign called “Making Our Street Safer for Everyone.” Volunteers are the driving force of ECWR’s campaign. They meet monthly to discuss ideas and plan initiatives.

Initially, ECWR conducted informal, voluntary surveys of over 2,000 people. An overwhelming number of female respondents said sexual harassment was part of their daily life. Eighty-three percent of women said men had sexually harassed them and 62 percent of men admitted to perpetrating sexual harassment. Fewer than two percent of women reported going to the police for help. ECWR published their results in a 2008 report “Clouds in Egypt’s Sky, Sexual Harassment: from Verbal Harassment to Rape.” The report garnered lots of attention in Egypt and around the world. Next, ECWR organized several forms of public awareness, including:

  • Distributing flyers with information like definitions of harassment, existing laws, how to file a police report, and how to campaign on the issue.
  • Creating public service radio announcements about sexual harassment.
  • Staging an anti-sexual harassment demonstration with 250 women and men on the steps of the Press Syndicate.
  • Holding press conferences and public awareness days at cultural centers, institutions, and hotels. Events have featured presentations and discussions on Egypt’s sexual harassment laws, women’s image in the media, the sociological and psychological impacts of harassment, group discussions on how to address the problem, self defense workshops, and live music and relevant films.

ECWR has been reaching out to youth, too, by training teachers and social workers to sensitize them to the issues of public sexual harassment and helping them know how to discuss the issues with their students. They recently released an animated five minute educational film and workbook for teachers to further help facilitate school discussions, including through painting and coloring. The resources teach children to trust others but to be careful and aware of inappropriate behavior and to learn the difference between appropriate and inappropriate language.

In addition to their (hopefully) pending success of working with Parliament to pass new legislation against sexual harassment, the efforts of ECWR has led to other types of activism and initiatives:

Anyone who is working to fight street harassment can learn a lot from the ECWR and their efforts. I will continue to watch their initiatives and outcomes. I hope that because of activists like them, one day women will have equality in public places in every country, and consequently, equality with men in general.

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