Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Save the Date for Anti-Street Harassment Week 2018!

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This  is our 8th year organizing global action across International Anti-Street Harassment Week! Groups and people in around 40 countries participate each year. Will you?

Dates: April 8 – 14, 2018

Co-Sponsors: Join us as a participating co-sponsoring organization, group, campus or institution

Participate: No action is too small to make a difference in raising awareness. Find ideas here!

Events: If you’re planning an event, let us know so we can help advertise it! This can include on- or off-line actions, including tweet chats! Complete this form with the details.

Contact: StopStreetHarassment@gmail.com if you plan to co-sponsor, participate and/or host an event!! (And fill out this form for your event.)

View photos from our 2017 actions and read the wrap-up report.

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2018 Plans for DC-Area Anti-Harassment Transit Efforts

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WMATA, CASS and SSH Staff at a 2018 planning meeting

It’s been nearly six years since we started working with Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on efforts to address and prevent sexual harassment on the transit system. Today, Chantal from CASS and I attended a 2018 planning meeting at WMATA HQ and we are looking forward to various forthcoming projects:

1) Audio announcements letting people know how to report harassment they experience or witness will start being played on Metro trains this month and on buses in the spring. They asked if one of us would record them and I ended up being the one who did. So if you’re in the area, listen for my voice on Metro!!

2) During International Anti-Street Harassment Week (April 8-14), we will partner together for our annual outreach day at various Metro stations. We’ll have new flyers, bracelets, and perhaps other giveaways, so stay tuned. We’ll also be looking for volunteers to help distribute information (date TBD but likely during evening rush hour on April 10 or 11).

3) Currently the third wave of print PSAs are up on the system. They are gorgeous! But if they’re up too long, people get used to them and don’t notice them anymore. They went up in Nov 2016, so it’s about time for new ads. We will work on a new set of ads over the summer.

4) We began a discussion about doing a follow-up survey of some kind to the 2016 ridership survey on sexual harassment to see how the latest print ads have been received and to see if people’s experiences with harassment have changed at all.

Those were the main updates. We are grateful that WMATA continues to dedicate time and resources to making the transit system safer.

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UK: Bristol Zero Tolerance

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Annabel Laughton, Gloucestershire, UK, SSH Blog Correspondent

For the last in my series of blog posts speaking to activists in Bristol and the UK, I spoke to Charlotte Gage, Partnerships Officer at Bristol Zero Tolerance (BZT). This is an initiative that was set up by Bristol Women’s Commission in 2015, and its vision is to “make Bristol zero tolerance to all forms of gender-based violence, abuse, harassment and exploitation”.

BZT does not run frontline services but is working towards becoming an umbrella for all relevant services in the city, aiding coordination and collaboration. Gage works extensively with business, offering training and awareness-raising to create a safe culture and change attitudes and behaviour. BZT can also advocate for particular policy positions on gender-based abuse, something frontline organisations often don’t have time for. Local police and the local council, for example, have drawn up action plans in conjunction with BZT, who can then hold them to account.

So what’s happening specifically with street harassment? Gage recently started a street harassment campaign.  “Local women were talking about it, so I felt it was important”, she says. The campaign is in its infancy as yet, being launched in International Anti-Street Harassment Week this April. At present Gage is focusing on gathering data to get a better picture of street harassment in the city. She has a researcher collecting data via local networks and specific communities. BZT also have a filmmaker recording women’s stories of street harassment.

Where the campaign goes after that will depend on the outcomes, but de-normalising street harassment and empowering people to speak out, either as victims or bystanders, is key. Gage explained she has had discussions with the local Police and Crime Commissioner and local organisation SARI (Stand Against Racism and Inequality) about the best way to enable this. “The police always say that if it’s not reported there is no data, and therefore there’s no problem”, she says, but exactly how street harassment is recorded is not straightforward. Gender is a “protected characteristic” under the UK Equality Act 2010, but street harassment isn’t automatically recorded as a hate crime, as, for example, attacks on someone because of their race or a disability would be. Victims have to specifically request that the offence is logged by police as “other – gender”, and even that won’t tell the whole story, because gender could mean male or female, masking the fact we know the vast majority of street harassment is targeted at women.

Gage is considering if BZT might lobby Avon and Somerset police to follow Nottinghamshire police’s lead and add a hate crime category of misogyny (the #NotACompliment campaign calls for this to be rolled out by police forces nationally), but is also wary of completely relying on a criminal response. “Not everyone wants to report to police. We want to give women different options”. One of these options might be a toolkit for people experiencing harassment, and bystanders.

BZT is clearly doing incredible work, but it’s not easy. Apart from Gage, BZT has just one other paid member of staff, Gage’s assistant, and they are both part-time. The initiative is funded by Public Health as it is prevention work, but like many publicly funded services in the UK, money is running out. It’s obvious that her drive and commitment are essential to the ongoing survival and success of this important work. As we finish our chat, Gage is clear that the issue of street harassment, which nearly all women experience, is a good way into a broader understanding of violence and abuse against women. “We need to get the message out there – street harassment is part of a culture which normalises and condones gender-based violence”.

Annabel is involved in campaigns for human rights, mental health, environmental issues and social justice. She has an honours degree in Classical Studies, a diploma in counselling, and works in Higher Education.

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2017 Anti-Street Harassment Week Report

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Thank you again so much to everyone who participated in the 2017 International Anti-Street Harassment Week!!!

Participating groups/orgs hailed from 40 countries and 20 U.S. states (and D.C.). Even more joined in for the Global Tweetathon and three tweetchats.

Here’s the wrap-up report!!!

The photo album is also updated.

Please mark your calendars for the 2018 event, April 8-14!!

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Romania: International Anti-Street Harassment Week in Bucharest

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

This year International Anti-Harassment Week in Bucharest was a full week! There were a couple of different activities which involved many people and targeted many different audiences.

First of all we had a meeting with a few young women who wanted to participate and we talked about street harassment that women bikers face on a daily basis in Bucharest. Maybe, in the summer time, we will do something about this, too.

Credit: Vasile Bianca

Then Hollaback! Romania organized a flash-mob in the center of the city of Bucharest. It was an example of intersectionality because the participants have different identities and personal experiences: 13 persons of different genders, different ethnicities, different sexual orientations. It was a good opportunity to get in touch with people interested in taking action and change something when it comes to the street harassment nightmare in Romania. Moreover, people stopped and gave us a nice feedback – “Good job, folks!”, “Yes, you are right, street harassment is a problem”!, “Congrats!” – while others wanted to take a photo with our protest signs.

A nice moment was when we crossed a street and on our right side we saw a working site where were four workers, so we all laughed because this was a good encounter (everybody knows that many site workers harass women). We had a little chat with them about street harassment and they assured us they respect women and they never harass them.

Credit: Vasile Bianca

Another action that we organized was a complex online campaign. Hollaback! Romania is just a baby now but I am pretty sure it will grow up and become a great activist movement. We gained 300 new likes in just one week (2-8 April) and impacted 16.000 people for some of the posts on the Facebook page. This numbers are a good outcome but not the only one!

ANAIS Association and I collaborate with a group of Informatics students to develop an online application to address street harassment in Bucharest. Even though things are moving slowly I see that there are more and more people interested and willing to get involved. I really hope that the app will be well received by the people and be a real tool against street harassment.

For 2-8 April we had a great time in Bucharest sharing ideas and hopes for the future regarding our fight against this type of violence. I was surprised to receive lots of support! We – the Hollaback! Romania team – are so grateful for it! For example, regarding the online campaign, National Agency for Equal Opportunities between Women and Men – ANES (subordinated to the Ministry of Labor and Social Justice) shared our campaign. It’s a rare thing to have authorities involved in feminist activism in Romania!

A really cool metal music band – Trooper – made a video where a member of it spoke to his fans about the harm that street harassment produces to society and to women.

Also, two martial arts schools from Bucharest shared Hollaback! Romania’s message announcing the International Anti Street Harassment Week and spread information about how important is to speak up and react to street harassment.

Finally, a member of the Ecologist Romanian Party conducted an interview with me about  street harassment in Romania and their media press release had 8.000 people read it!

So yes, I am very glad that step by step (very little steps indeed) we starting to shake things up and grow the street harassment discussion in Bucharest. I try to convince people that we all have a role to play in preventing harassment in public spaces (in all its forms) and each stakeholder has a responsibility in defining and respecting his own role for creating safer and more welcoming public spaces. I am pleased to see that many of them get the message and step out of their comfort zone taking action.

We look forward for the International Anti Street Harassment Week in 2018 but we won’t wait that long to do other activities and campaigns against street harassment in Romania!

Simona-Marie is a Ph.D. Student in Political Sciences, working on a thesis on gender-based street harassment in Romania. She is an activist and organizes numerous public actions (marches, flash-mobs, protests) against sexual violence and street harassment against women. Now she is part of an working-group trying to improve by public policies the situation of young homeless people in Romania. You can find her on Facebook.

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