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UK: New Campaign Addresses Transit Harassment

August 13, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Tilly Grove, London, UK, SSH Correspondent

As a student at a London university, the city’s transport system is something I use daily during term time. Consequently, I stand alongside the 15 per cent of women who responded to a Transport for London (TfL) survey and reported that they had experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault on the London transport network. In fact, I consider myself to stand alongside a much larger percentage of women. That 15 per cent is only of the women who responded to the survey, and only those who felt comfortable talking about what had happened to them in the first place. Often, women do not even realise that what has occurred to them is sexual harassment. Either way, 90 per cent of the women in that survey said that they had not reported what happened to them to the police, and TfL have rightly identified that this is a huge problem.

Project Guardian is the initiative that seeks to change that. The British Transport Police (BTP), working closely with TfL, Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police, have recognised that sexual harassment on public transport is a major concern for travellers, and vastly under-reported. Having studied a similar exercise in Boston, and with guidance from women’s campaign groups like the End Violence Against Women coalition, Everyday Sexism, and Hollaback London, Project Guardian will see all 2,000 of the officers working on the public transport network receive training in victim awareness, and selected officers given extra training on sexual offences courses.

The core aim of Project Guardian is to increase awareness of sexual offences, and encourage victims to come forward. By clearly outlining what constitutes a sexual offence, the BTP are taking a good first step. A lot of women – myself included – will likely not have been aware, for example, that any comments or actions that make them uncomfortable on their journeys constitute harassment. When I have had men actively stalk me across platforms and through carriages, or make obvious efforts to stare up my skirt, or make sexually charged comments about my appearance, I would certainly never have thought that this was something I should report, and not just something I had to shrug off. The BTP insists that any offence of this nature will be taken “extremely seriously”, and urges anyone who has witnessed or experienced something to come forward.

While not the primary objective of the initiative, a reduction in instances of sexual assault would certainly be desirable too, as has been seen in Boston. Project Guardian seeks to deter offenders by deploying up to 180 officers to stations at a time, using undercover officers, creating a high police profile at vulnerable times and places (like quiet stations late at night), working in partnership with railway businesses, using CCTV footage, and publishing details of all successful prosecutions. Judging by the figures from its first week, it might be set for success: reporting of sexual offences increased by 26%, and 10 arrests were made. This may see the initiative rolled out elsewhere across Britain.

The Twitter hashtag #ProjGuardian illustrates clearly that experiences of sexual harassment are not a rarity, and not a one-off. There are thousands of women sharing their stories, all of them demonstrating that this has become an accepted part of our experiences as women in public. Even when it is not physically happening to us, the possibility of it is always hanging over us. If Project Guardian can change one thing, it can change the idea amongst so many of us that it has to be this way, that we must be silent and accept it. Ideally, it will change more than that. When Ellie Cosgrave had a man ejaculate on her on the train, she took matters into her own hands and put on a brilliant and intelligent protest, Take Back the Tube; she did this because she had reported it to TfL, who did not even respond. Women deserve more than this. We deserve organisations that listen to us and take us seriously, and most importantly, we deserve to be able to use the public transport network without constant fear and anticipation of someone violating us in the first place. Let’s hope Project Guardian is the start of that.

To report sexual offences to the British Transport Police, talk to staff or officers at the station, text 61016, or call 0800 40 50 40.

Tilly is studying for a BA in War Studies at King’s College London, where she is writing her dissertation on the effect that perceptions of gender have on the roles which women adopt in conflict. You can follow her on Tumblr and Twitter, @tillyjean_.

USA: Street Harassment on college campuses: Does size matter?

August 6, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Taylor Kuether, Minnesota, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

My experience with street harassment has happened almost exclusively during my college years. I go to a mid-size state school in northwestern Wisconsin, and the harassment seems to follow a pattern: The number of catcalls rises and falls with the temperatures. Every spring, the first day I deem it warm enough to wear shorts, I can count on someone making a loud comment about it, usually from across the campus mall. If I decide to go on my first bike ride of the season, I know I’m going to hear men shouting at me from passing cars. And once the height of summer hits, if a friend and I want to go floating (tubing down the Chippewa River, which runs right through our campus), we should expect to hear lewd comments aimed at us as we carry our inner tubes to the riverfront.

Being yelled at as I try to live my life doesn’t make me feel comfortable or safe. It isn’t something anyone should leave the house expecting or calculate into their day. But in my experience, at least before this summer, the comments were just that – comments.

This summer, I’m living in Minneapolis – a much larger city than my college town – for an internship. Minneapolis is home to the University of Minnesota, a Big 10 school with an enrollment of about 50,000. And on any given weekend night, you can find many of those students in “Dinkytown,” the city’s college bar district.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I went out for a drink in Dinkytown. Just 20 minutes into our outing, a college-aged man came up to us on the sidewalk and tried to put his arm around me, asking us where we were headed. I was surprised, but I shrugged it off as my friend and I kept walking, wordlessly, heading to the next bar.

Once inside, we tried to go upstairs, only to find a second college-aged male who took it upon himself to drunkenly block us from doing so. He stood squarely in front of me, slurring pickup lines at me and making it impossible to ascend the stairs. Annoyed, I grabbed his shoulder and moved him out of our way.

At our last stop of the night, a burrito place where we were hoping to grab some food before heading home, a third college-aged man came up behind my friend, pressed himself against her, and asked her what she was up to. It was the third time in a span of maybe two hours that someone had come up to us and physically entered our space. This wasn’t the street harassment I was used to – words thrown from afar with the space between my harasser and me acting as a buffer, a safety net. This was much more aggressive, much more invasive.

I’ve speculated as to why there is such a difference: Is it the size of the school? Is it the presence of Greek life (my school doesn’t have it; at U of M it’s huge)? Is it the size of the city the school is in?

I’ve always assumed college-aged men think they can get away with harassment for three reasons: one, their new found freedom and lack of supervision, two, their age and lack of maturity, and three, the anonymity afforded by the sheer size of a college campus.

At a big school, your own stupid actions can disappear into the much larger sea of stupid actions. At a big school, you can “get away” with more – after all, if you’re not the only one doing it, it must not be wrong, right?

What have your own experiences been with street harassment on college campuses? Did the size or location of the school impact the harassment you experienced or witnessed? Leave a response on the blog or tweet at me at @taylorkuether.

Taylor Kuether is a senior journalism student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconsin. She has previously written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, worked as a reporter at her city’s daily newspaper, The Leader-Telegram, and its arts and culture publication, VolumeOne, hosted a local-music centered radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio, and worked as Editor-in-Chief at her student newspaper, where she enjoyed writing biting, slightly rant-y columns about feminist issues.

Canada: They Asked for the Numbers

July 29, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Lisane Thirsk, Ottawa, Canada, SSH Correspondent

Last week, Hollaback! Ottawa released Our city, our space, our voice: A report on street harassment in Ottawa. The report is based on an online survey with more than 300 respondents, as well as testimony from an open forum.

Among other findings, it revealed that:

* 97% of respondents had experienced a form of street harassment in the past year
* 44% of respondents had experienced street harassment at least once on public transportation
* Only 10% of respondents had reported an incident of street harassment

The report has prompted some important conversation among Ottawa residents. It’s a conversation Hollaback! Ottawa’s site director Julie Lalonde initiated with city officials back in February after noting a trend in the stories submitted and mapped on the Hollaback! Ottawa website: street harassment was often taking place on buses or at bus stops.

But at the initial meeting requested by Julie, local government and public transit officials maintained that she didn’t have enough quantifiable evidence to show that street harassment is frequent on buses in Ottawa.

Julie isn’t one to be deterred. She wasted no time in calling on other local feminist organizations and Hollaback! volunteers, including myself, to help organize the forum, design the survey, and analyze the findings to better understand the problem and potential solutions.

The data compiled sheds light on a diversity of experiences (many truly horrifying), reveals other ‘hot spots’ where harassment occurs (libraries and parks), and captures the community’s determination to put an end to street harassment by engaging bystanders (amazing!).

In the lead-up to the report’s release, I had the opportunity to attend a series of follow-up meetings with Julie and city officials. The meetings became more productive and were likely granted urgency by the city following news coverage about a series of sexual assaults on buses.

Throughout these processes I kept reflecting on how the problem of street harassment was at first dismissed by officials claiming that the stories submitted to Hollaback! Ottawa weren’t themselves legitimate enough to justify further conversation.

Yet there are too many successful initiatives out there to ignore the benefits of crowdsourcing this type of information about violence against women.

Whenever skepticism about these types of initiatives blocks or delays action to stop violence, we need to ask some questions. Are women being silenced, either in person or online? Are we erasing the meaning survivors attribute to their own experiences? Why are those in positions of power so inclined to say, “But someone could have just fabricated those online submissions”?

I do understand the necessity of more traditional data-collection methods. Are there downsides to drawing conclusions from crowdsourced data? Yes. But are there also drawbacks to sexual violence data collected through formal surveys, interviews, focus groups or police records? Absolutely.

Above all, we can’t assume that all women feel safe and empowered to speak out and report street harassment, especially to authority figures. As in any country, survivors in Canada face both social and institutional barriers to reporting sexual violence. Here in Ottawa we heard over and over at the forum and in the survey responses, “Reporting is really hard.”

Hopefully the results of Hollaback! Ottawa’s report will spur more efforts to address street harassment throughout the city. The results paint a discouraging but unsurprising picture, considering the available statistics on the prevalence of street harassment globally. The low level of reporting in Ottawa is also in line with government studies showing that about one in ten sexual assaults are reported to police (Statistics Canada). With this in mind, the official number of reported sexual assaults on transit, for example, represents only a fraction of the problem in Ottawa.

What kinds of numbers will we require before taking concrete action to prevent street harassment?

To me, it’s not just the numbers that speak for themselves. The stories submitted online also speak volumes about the need for action. Let’s trust those voices too.

Lisane works in the non-profit communications sector and supports local anti-street harassment advocacy through Hollaback! Ottawa. In 2012, she completed a Master’s in Socio-Legal Studies at York University in Toronto, where she wrote her Major Research Paper on gender-based street harassment. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies and Spanish from the University of British Columbia.

USA: Empowerment Through Solidarity at Holla:Revolution

July 28, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Maggie Freleng, NYC, USA, SSH Correspondent

“Say thank you, bitch, when I compliment you!”

I was walking to my house and walked past a group of men foaming at the mouth for anything with a vagina. In my normal fashion I did not acknowledge their comments and kept walking, not skipping a beat. Just brush it off and get from A to B. Numb. When I did not respond, their desperation turned to something different. They tried to break me. I was verbally assaulted as they screamed after me.

I am never the kind of person in my personal life to stand by when I feel attacked, wronged, and taken advantage of — but this time I did.

Not only did I feel violated by their comments when I was minding my own business, but I felt disgusting for letting it happen so easily. I should have fought. I felt hopeless. Helpless. Disempowered. Most of all, I felt alone.

Alone is when you down the street and are powerless against being an object of fair game for whoever feels like spewing crap out of their mouth at with slim to no repercussions.

Alone is when it feels like there is no justice and there will be no justice, we just have to live in constant fear, shame, guilt and disgust.

We all share our stories of street harassment to aware others of the problem, but many of us also just want to say: hey, you’re not alone.

Instead of just sharing my street harassment story, I want to share where I found community and solidarity and empowerment. I want to let everyone know they have a support group — an international support group. We are not alone
.
Thursday July 25 was history. It was the first ever international speakers series on ending street harassment hosted by Hollaback!, a network of international activists dedicated to ending street harassment across the globe.

I have never felt such a strong sense of empowerment, community and solidarity as I did being there.

“It’s definitely really empowering,” Rachel Morillo, a student at Swarthmore College attending the event told me. “Especially to see that women are interested in discussing street harassment. Even when I try discussing street harassment with my friends it is sort of brushed off. It is great to see that there is a community of people interested in ending this.”

The community of people attending involved everyone from feminist media critic Jennifer Pozner, to Jimmie Briggs, human rights activist and founder of Man Up Campaign, to the amazing Nicola Briggs who became an icon of the movement when she went viral on YouTube after confronting her violator on a NYC subway in 2010.

These people showed me there is solidarity in the fight to end the torment many of us experience on a daily, hourly basis.

They showed me that there are people taking action and making an initiative towards change and building communities for people like myself to join to take back our pride, our power, and our streets.

Nefertiti Martin, community organizer for Girls for Gender Equity taught me, “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but the words used to hurt you can be transformed to heal you.”

Rokafella, female breakdancer, taught me that breakdancing is a way to feel empowered against sexual harassment. “Breakdancing was my answer to being grabbed while dancing. You might get kicked in the neck,” she said.

Ryann Holmes co-founder of Brooklyn Boihood, an organization empowering queer and trans bois* of color, taught me that we can join or start groups like his to undo stereotypes of masculinity and masculine privilege, including misogynistic views of women.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay, editor at Feministing.com, taught me that every small act, every story, can create a movement.

Genevieve “Danger” Berrick, roller derby enthusiast and founder of Hollaback! LA, taught me derby is about bodies in space and bodies in contact, just like street harassment, and to vent those frustrations, join a group where women make their own rules about their own bodies.

Julie Lalonde, social justice advocate and feminist, taught me haters are gonna hate, and the only way not to be silenced is through solidarity.

Pamela Shifman, director of initiatives for girls and women at the NoVo Foundation, taught me the epidemic of violence against women is starting to make its way into the public consciousness because of groups like these. “If we combine the true potential of philanthropy, the love of all people, with the transformative power of women and girls organizing for justice, we will see change.”

And finally, Rochelle Keyhan, a member of the board of directors of Hollaback! taught everyone that as long as we have been street harassed we have demanded the right to equality in public life, including the right to feel safe in public spaces.

Street harassment is not a new thing. But now that there is a mobilized campaign against it, as Keyhan said, we will end “this long lived chapter of our collective history.”

Being part of this movement makes it impossible to feel alone. This community of men and women make me feel like I have a team, a crew, an entire posse of allies across the globe standing behind me, telling me not to break and keep my head up, every time I am invaded, violated, and harassed on the street.

In the words of Emily May, founder of Hollaback!, “You’re witnessing the birth of a global movement that will change the way we walk down the street.”

For me, just knowing I am a part of this movement gives me power.

Maggie is a Brooklyn based freelance writer and photographer focusing on social justice and women’s issues. She currently writes for Vitamin W. Maggie graduated with a B.A in Journalism and English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2011, concentrating on dystopian literature. You can read more of her writing on her blog or follow her on Twitter, @dixiy89.

England: Street Harassment, sunshine, and… shorts?

July 26, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Levi Grayshon, Manchester, England, SSH Correspondent

Here in the UK, we are in the midst of a heatwave. The sticky, sunny days are sprawling in front of us, and have been rolling on for the last fortnight.

Sometimes, though, finding something sun-suitable is difficult. When the sun comes out, the clothes go away. Jeans and jumpers are stuffed into the back of the wardrobes and the skirts and shorts are dusted off and worn with pride. Or are they?

Two years ago, I was strolling down the street in a pair of shorts. I was alone. A pair of men walked up to me, sniggering and making comments on my legs. On the way home, another man stopped directly in front of me, looked me up and down and told me that my legs were “too pale to be wearing that.” Since that incident, I have been uneasy about exposing my legs on hot days. What gives people the right to act like this?

Nothing.

Seriously. Not only are magazines scaring us into doing 200 squats a day, and music videos convincing us that we must shave and apply sparkly goop to our legs in order to look passable, strangers feel need the to reinforce the idea that your body does not reach their standards. This is hideous. It is easy for others to tell you that their opinion does not matter. It is also easy for people to say “well why don’t you work out more/tan/go on a diet/stop wearing shorts?”

As simple as it sounds, the only person that you should listen to is yourself. No one has the right to make you feel uncomfortable about your body. It is hard to block out those voices when their words scratch and stab at your self-confidence, and feel as those they are branding themselves onto your thighs like a hot iron, but there is only one person that you should listen to when getting dressed in the morning, and only one question that you should ask: “Do I feel comfortable?”

Legs are legs. Shorts are shorts.

As Laura Bates from The Everyday Sexism Project quite rightly stated this week on Radio 2: “What women wear does not make them responsible for men’s reaction to them.”

She is spot on. If a person on the street harasses you over your outfit – whether honking their horn at you, shouting comments, or even following you – then they are the ones in the wrong. Don’t feel pressured to change anything about yourself – you are not to blame for their ill-judged actions, and don’t allow anyone else to make you feel that you are.

Levi graduated from university with a degree in Film and TV screenwriting this summer. As a freelance writer, she has been writing for The F-Word and Gamer-UK. You can follow her rants and ramblings on Twitter, @part_heart.

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