Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

SSH’s 10 Year Anniversary (Part 2)

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Since it was founded 10 years ago, SSH has had a big impact locally in the Washington, DC-area, nationally in the U.S. and internationally! We are proud to have helped create a societal shift where street harassment is taken seriously by many, and there are global entities like the United Nations, national and city-level legislatures, researchers, academics, journalists, NGO advocacy groups, civil society organizations and community groups that address it.

One way to measure SSH’s impact is to look at the number of news articles citing SSH’s research and work – and that number is more than 350. This includes articles at BBC, Guardian, USA Today, the Today Show, CNN, Wall Street Journal, PBS News Hour, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Marie Clare Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Shape Magazine, Health Magazine, Runner’s World Magazine, Ms. Magazine and New Moon Girls Magazine.

SSH’s 11 Biggest Achievements

In reflecting over the past 10 years, I decided to make a list of what I see as our biggest achievements. I aimed for 10 and came up with 11 that had to be on the list! 😊 Thank you so much to everyone who helped make them possible!

1. Running one of the go-to websites in the world for information about street harassment. It has been visited by at least 1.5 million people (the figure since we started tracking it seven years ago… this includes more than one million people in the past four years). Thousands of people from around the world have shared their street harassment stories on the website to bring attention to the problem, and there have been 13 cohorts of Blog Correspondents who wrote about street harassment issues and activism in their communities around the globe.

2. Commissioning and publishing in 2014 the first large-scale, nationally representative survey on street harassment that includes respondents of all genders. Our national study not only includes the findings from the 2,000-person survey but also the summaries of focus groups with various under-represented voices and ideas for how to stop street harassment based on interviews with various academic and community-based experts. The study has been used by countless entities and cited by every major U.S. news outlet.

3. Commissioning and publishing in 2018 another nationally representative survey on all forms of sexual harassment and assault across all locations. The purpose was to bring forward the data behind the #MeToo stories and show that public spaces is where people experience sexual harassment the most. The New York Times requested the right to do an exclusive story on the findings the day it was released, and many other outlets covered it after that. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UN Women have requested presentations on the findings in the coming months.

4. Starting International Anti-Street Harassment Week to provide space for groups and people all over the world to speak out against street harassment in their communities at the same time, and then overseeing eight of these weeks. Groups in up to 40 countries routinely participate, engaging tens of thousands of people in total each year.

5. Collaborating with Collective Action for Safe Spaces and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on a widescale and comprehensive anti-sexual harassment transit campaign since 2011. It’s entailed: training frontline staff, three waves of print PSAs and one wave of audio PSAs, two representative surveys of riders, and annual outreach/flyering days at various Metro stations. Millions of riders have been exposed to the campaign.

6. Founding the first-ever National Street Harassment Hotline in 2016, which is run in collaboration with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network and offers 24/7 free support by phone or secure IM chat, in English and Spanish. It serves an average of 30 people per month.

Anti-street harassment activists from Brazil, India, Italy and USA at HABITAT III in Ecuador

 

7. Speaking at and participating in 150+ important conferences, rallies, and events, including:

  • UN convenings on sexual violence in India (x2), Turkey, Ecuador and Mexico as well as multiple UN Commission on the Status of Women events in New York City;
  • An International Women’s Day March with UN Women in New York City;
  • Several Slutwalk rallies in Washington, DC;
  • National Sexual Assault Conference, National Women’s Studies Association Conference, International Coalition Against Street Harassment Conference, and NOW’s annual conference.
  • City Council Hearings on street harassment in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
  • Workshops and lectures at more than 40 university/college campuses, including NYU, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Irvine, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska, University of Nebraska, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Portland State University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, George Mason University, Santa Clara University and more.
US Department of State trip to Ethiopia

8. Advising entities like Google, Lyft, Runner’s World, U.S. Department of State, New York City Council and lawmakers in the U.S. and internationally on their efforts to address street harassment and related issues. Notably, New Jersey passed a law against upskirt photos thanks to initial consultation with SSH early in the legislative process.

9. Producing four publications that are regularly read, cited and have had an impact, including:

  • Two academic books: Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women (available in paperback for $13.50), and Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World (available in hardcover for $37 and $35 for ebook).
  • A collection of empowering responses to harassment in 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers. (Available in paperback for $10, Kindle for $6.99).
  • A state-by-state legal guide called Know Your Rights: Street Harassment and the Law (Download the free toolkit (PDF) or access the companion web feature).

 

10. Mentoring 14 groups around the world on their anti-street harassment projects through the Safe Public Spaces Mentoring Program. It started as a PILOT in 2013 when we worked with the leaders of projects in Afghanistan, Cameroon and Chicago, USA. In 2014, we worked with six teams in India, Kenya, Nepal, Nicaragua, Serbia, and the USA. In 2015, we worked with four teams in France, India, Romania, and the USA.

11. Leading or collaborating on campaigns against companies that trivialize street harassment. The campaigns entail pressuring companies to drop harmful ads and change offensive language. One example is a campaign against a construction company in New Jersey that had a billboard suggesting street harassment is a compliment – a petition led to the company to immediately remove it.

What will our next 10 years bring?

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SSH’s 10 Year Anniversary (Part 1)

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This month marks the 10-year anniversary of Stop Street Harassment! I am so grateful to the thousands of people who have shared their stories on the blog; participated in International Anti-Street Harassment Week; served as Blog Correspondents, social media volunteers, interns and board members; donated to fund our programs; attended SSH talks; read our articles and publications; signed our petitions; and more. With the help of our community, we have achieved a lot in 10 years, particularly considering we are a small organization run by volunteers who all have other jobs.

To commemorate this big 10-year milestone, here is a history of how we came to be, followed by a list of 11 of our biggest achievements!

History of Stop Street Harassment

During the fall of 2006 and spring/summer of 2007, I researched and wrote my master’s thesis on gender-based street harassment while attending George Washington University in Washington, DC. I focused on how, in lieu of social recognition of the problem, women were using websites like the Street Harassment Project and Hollaback! chapter sites to share personal stories and strategies for dealing with street harassment. I conducted a small survey as part of my research. After I turned in my thesis, I put the survey results online – and reporters started finding it. At the time, there was so little accessible research on this topic that my thesis research was newsworthy.

The most influential article that cited my thesis was one on CNN.com in May 2008. At that time, it was commonplace for people to view street harassment as a compliment, a minor annoyance, no big deal or the fault of the person being harassed. The title of the CNN article reflects this reality: “Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?” Really, though, the title should have read something like, “Catcalling: A form of street harassment that must end.”

The article inspired dozens of blog posts and articles, hundreds of comments to the CNN article and many emails that I personally received that showed: 1) how common street harassment is and 2) how many misconceptions there are about the problem.

I was working full-time and I had no intention of becoming an anti-street harassment activist, but the response to the article demonstrated a clear need for public education on the topic. This need became more urgent once I went back to the websites I had analyzed for my thesis and found that the two websites I liked the best were either gone or inactive. Plus, at the time, unless you lived in one of the few cities with Hollaback! chapter sites, you didn’t have a place to publicly share your street harassment story. My domestic partner suggested I start my own website where I could share the resources I had collected through my thesis research. I also could provide space for story-sharing from people located anywhere in the world. I decided to do it.

In May 2008, Stop Street Harassment was born.

SSH began as a website that listed resources about street harassment and there was a companion blog where people could share their stories (I combined the website and blog during a 2011 website redesign). After a few months, I also began to write blog posts tracking relevant news and initiatives globally. I regularly searched online for new initiatives and conducted interviews with the people running them (after a few years, there were so many of these efforts that I could no longer keep up with them!).

In the years since, SSH’s work has expanded to include various public education components, community mobilization programs and direct services. Our projects usually have come about because I’ve seen a gap that needs to be filled and decide to fill it, be that by commissioning a nationally representative survey to collect data PROVING street harassment is a problem, founding a national hotline to provide emotional support for people facing street harassment, or organizing space for groups all over the world to join forces on an annual basis to speak out against street harassment together. SSH also does a lot of idea-sharing of what’s working in various parts of the world and makes introductions between activists when relevant.

One of my big goals in the early years of SSH was to document the problem, which we’ve done. Another was to help change the societal acceptance of street harassment as being inevitable, a compliment or the fault of the harassed person (e.g. see the CNN article title!). We’ve made a lot of progress there, too. While there are some people who still spew views that minimize and dismiss the harms of street harassment, there are fewer of them. Further, it is much less common for journalists, government officials and others who have a public voice to frame it this way. For instance, in 2011, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority publicly said regarding sexual harassment on the transit system: “One person’s harassment is another person’s flirting.” Now they are one of the transit systems doing the most in the world to address and prevent sexual harassment.

There is still a lot of work left to do, but I feel pleased with what has changed in 10 years.

Thank you to everyone who has supported SSH and has helped create a societal shift where street harassment is taken more seriously and addressed. Hopefully one day harassing strangers in public spaces will be completely socially unacceptable and then people of all genders and backgrounds can safely enjoy and utilize public spaces.

While much of our work is done pro bono, we are grateful to our donors who have made initiatives like our national studies and the hotline possible. You too can make a tax-deductible donation to keep our work going.

Read about 11 of our biggest achievements since May 2008!

 

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USA: Time Machine: Street Harassment

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Elizabeth Kuster, Brooklyn, NY, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

When I first started making notes about the harassment I received from random men on a daily basis — and began talking to other women about it, to get their stories — thousands of people around the country were taking buses to Washington so they could march in protest of the Republican president who was trying to limit a woman’s right to choose.

The beating of a Black man by a group of white police officers had created a dark and disturbing negative energy in New York City. Thousands of demonstrators in Times Square were protesting against police departments’ blatant racial discrimination.

A female editor from the same publication that was going to print my first street harassment article was working on an exposé of the pay-or-play casting couch. “Hollywood’s ugliest secret goes public, but will actresses take action against a power broker who can make them a star?” she asked, before quoting a frustrated Halle Berry: “How many complaints will have to be filed before something happens to these guys?”

I can testify firsthand that it is really hard to write about street harassment when there’s so much other terrible shit going on.

Meanwhile, in my personal life, I had just been dumped by the stable (read: unimaginative) older man I thought I loved. (“I need some space,” he said — proving that even when breaking up, he wasn’t capable of originality.) I was in the midst of casually dating an actor/comedian (!) while dealing with crippling menstrual cramps that kept me laser-focused on my uterus for far too many days a month.

And through it all, I was keeping a diary of all of the random ugly comments, stares, propositions and unwanted touches I was receiving from strange men on a daily basis. Let me tell you: It’s hard to “go high” like Michelle Obama when the cultural mood — and the article you’re working on — demand that you focus for months on the lowest of the low. And that lowest of the low is alternately staring at you, ordering you to smile, stroking your hair on the subway train and yelling things like, “I want to f*ck you!” and “You got a fat ass!”

Anyway, I guess it’s time for me to tell you when all of this was going on in my world. You probably think you know. But I bet you don’t.

Hint: It wasn’t 2017.

It wasn’t 2016, either.

Give up?

It was 1992.

1992, people.

Nineteen.

F*cking.

Ninety.

Two.

Here’s the cover of the September, 1992, issue of Glamour magazine, which featured my groundbreaking cover story on street harassment:

It was the first time the topic had ever been covered in the mainstream media. A few articles describing a phenomenon called “street harassment” had been published in academic journals or a feminist publication, but that was about it. Back then, I looked toward the future with hope, confident that my article, which ultimately reached 15 million American readers, would empower women and help lawmakers name, fight, and eventually put an end to the problem.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

So perhaps my current despair is understandable. Because I seem to be stuck in a feminist’s Groundhog Day. On the face of it, so very little has changed. It’s 25 years since my article came out, and street harassment — and so many other issues — are still huge problems.

The September 1992 issue of Glamour featured Charla Krupp’s prescient article about Hollywood’s casting couch. Today, there’s Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, #TimesUp, and #MeToo.

In May of 1992, there were race riots after the beating of Rodney King. Today, there’s Trayvon Martin, #BlackLivesMatter, the Wall, the Muslim Ban, and ICE.

On April 5, 1992, a massive pro-choice march took place in D.C. Just this week, Republicans tried to shove through yet another misogynist abortion ban. A pussy grabber is in the White House. Women are marching by the millions. And I’m still hoping against hope that I will someday find a human being with a penis who is capable of loving and supporting me and my uterus.

But of course, some things have changed. In my upcoming blogs for Stop Street Harassment, I will revisit my original article and its aftereffects, and explore some of the progress women have made since 1992 in the areas of personal space and physical safety. I’ll celebrate our victories and spotlight areas that still need work. Because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And it’s high time for us women to put this particular Groundhog Day to bed once and for all.

Stay tuned.

Elizabeth pitched and wrote the very first mainstream-media article about street harassment. She has held full-time editorial positions at publications such as Glamour, Seventeen and The Huffington Post and is author of the self-help/humor book Exorcising Your Ex. You can follow Elizabeth on Twitter at @bethmonster.

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Women’s History: Street Harassment Resistance in 1944 and 1970

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Happy Women’s History Month! Here are two examples of street harassment resistance in the U.S. about which you may not know. They are both included in the introduction of my forthcoming book about global street harassment activism that I submitted to my editor on Sunday (!). The book will be out in early September 2015.

Via ColorLines

1. From the 1940s to 1960s a large number of black women collectively challenged the centuries-old practice of white men harassing and raping black women with impunity. In 1944, for example, white men harassed and then gang raped a twenty-four-year-old black sharecropper, wife and mother Recy Taylor as she walked home from church with female friends. Her story caught the attention of a Montgomery NAACP member Rosa Parks, an established anti-rape crusader. Parks led a national campaign for justice for Taylor that resulted in the assailants admitting they committed the crime — despite white male police trying to cover for them — and the case went to trial. Sadly, the all-white, all-male jury did not indict any of Taylor’s assailants.

Despite not gaining justice for Taylor, Parks’ campaign lay the foundation for other campaigns. In Danielle McGuire’s 2011 book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, she chronicles Taylor’s story and this important time period and how the civil rights movement began not just out of outrage over the lynching of black men, segregation, and general discrimination, but also because of people’s indignation over white men’s assaults of black women in public spaces.

2. During the 1970s and early 1980s, street harassment was occasionally addressed within the Women’s Liberation actions, the rape crisis center movement, and Take Back the Night rallies. Women hung up and distributed flyers, patrolled places with high rates reports of rape, and even held demonstrations. An example of a demonstration occurred in New York City in June 1970. Newspapers routinely printed the commuting schedules and physical measurements of pretty women who worked in Wall Street, and men would line up outside their workplaces to harass them. In response, Karla Jay and Alix Kates Shulman organized an “olge-in” during which they yelled sexualized “compliments” at men on the street.

“We’re trying to point out what it feels like to be whistled at, pointed at constantly every time we walk down the street…they think that we’re just sexual objects. And we don’t want to be sexual objects anymore,” one of the women said in an interview.

The work we do today builds on decades of resistance and the bravery of women like Recy, Rosa, Karla and Alix.

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