“As a co-sponsor of International Anti-Street Harassment Week, Brooklyn Movement Center held a chalk party at Fulton Park, a public space in Bed-Stuy where women are often harassed. We wrote anti-street harassment messages on the ground and declared it a street harassment free zone! We partnered up with Charla Harlow of Harlow Projects who video-recorded people sharing their experiences with street harassment.” View all of the photos.

This blog post is cross-posted with permission from Aspiring Yogini.

This week is International Anti-Street Harassment Week. A time to talk about and fight back against what is most likely the most prevalent form of sexual harassment in the modern world.

I was thrilled when my friend discovered that this Week exists. We found out about it after we had launched our anti-street harassment awareness group, Calling Out Cat Calling. It motivated us to work even harder to join the movement to fight back against the mentality that makes so many people (frankly mostly men) think that public sexual harassment is OK.

The Week is run and organized by the world’s largest anti-street harassment group, Stop Street Harassment. Activist Holly Kearl heads up the entire operation.

It genuinely confuses me why so many men feel like it’s OK to openly insult and verbally abuse women in public. I’ve been street harassed so many times that I’ve lost count, and I was first publicly harassed when I was about twelve years old. What is the mentality that makes men think it’s perfectly acceptable to make kissing noises or to call passers-by ‘baby’? Worse, why do so many men persistently harass women and refuse to take no for an answer? Why is harassment so common in the developed world in the twenty-first century?

The series of answers to these questions are long and complicated. Words and phrases that frequently get thrown around are Rape Culture, Patriarchy, Sexism, Male Entitlement etc.

What I want to emphasize this week is the importance of not letting the words and phrases above lose their meaning. All of them are contributing factors to the prevalence of street harassment and all of them merit discussion.

I’m excited to put up posters (examples are the pictures above) around the city of Toronto this week, to keep the conversation alive on social media. And to blog blog blog until my fingers fall off.

This week I will be writing about all of the concepts listed above, and I will also be discussing what motivated me and my friends to start a group against cat calling in the first place.

This year we will get one step closer to taking back the streets! And in my lifetime I hope to see the end of this far too prevalent form of verbal abuse.

By Rachel Kellogg is on the admin team of Calling Out Cat Calling a Toronto-based anti-street harassment group. Join the conversation.

Safe City Nepal is taking many actions for International Anti-Street Harassment Week, including taking back the bridge!

“Many women and girls have shared and reported various instances of harassment against them on the overhead bridge. They’d rather get killed by a vehicle then walk on the overhead [pedestrian] bridge. Hence, this was our opportunity to take- back the bridge,” Smriti RDN a field research coordinator with Safe Cities Nepal, told me over email.

“We are happy to announce that we were taken seriously and most of them responded positively towards our initiative. The take back the overhead bridge today was so effective that we are planning to do the same on other overhead bridges of the city in coming days too!!”

View more photos.

In Yemen, the Safe Streets campaign launched a Hotline for street harassment reports, to coincide with International Anti-Street Harassment Week.

Director Ghaidaa Alabsi writes: “The aim of the Hotline is to monitor and document the crimes of sexual harassment on the electronic map of the campaign to deliver the suffering of those who were subjected to sexual harassment to the public opinion and put pressure on the decision-makers to implement a mechanism to reduce the phenomenon of sexual harassment in the streets of Yemen. The victim can report by sending SMS to the following number 772150052 and explaining the location where it happened.”