Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Philadelphia City Council Hearing Recap

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Philadelphia City Council Hearing, Nov. 7, 2013

Today, the second-ever city council hearing on street harassment was held in Philadelphia! The first was held in 2010 in New York City.

This hearing came about because Council Member James Kenney read tweets by Hollaback! Philly about street harassment, researched the issue and he decided he wanted to address it. When he reached out to Hollaback! Philly over Twitter to ask what he could do, Hollaback! Philly’s director Rochelle Keyhan requested a city council hearing. While it took seven months to get it scheduled, today it happened.

During the morning hearing in Philadelphia’s City Hall, nine people testified (some represented organizations like FAAN Mail and Women Bike PHL, others were simply there as citizens), and Rochelle played a video of teenage girls sharing their stories, since they couldn’t attend due to school. Most people courageously and passionately shared their street harassment stories during their testimonies, Rochelle presented Hollaback! Philly’s new survey data, and I put the issue into a global context and explained why it’s a human rights violation. (Stay tuned, I will post everyone’s testimonies soon.)

SSH Board Member & Philly Resident Nuala Cabral Testified

The main ask of the City Council is to help Hollaback! Philly organize community safety audits, a type of action created by METRAC, which the United Nations uses around the world and which activists in Washington, D.C. (co-led by SSH and Collective Action for Safe Spaces) and NYC (co-led by city council members and several activist groups) have already used. Hollaback! Philly needs help from the City Council in connecting with diverse community groups and churches in neighborhoods throughout the city to ensure that volunteers conducting the audit come from a range of backgrounds and perspectives.

The four male city council members who heard us were very sympathetic and strongly against the issue. This is HUGE progress. They were also interested in seeing the issue brought up to kids in schools and working with police officers to train them to know how to help with street harassment incidents.

After the hearing, Council Member Kenney met with us and assured us this was not a “one and done day,” but that he was committed to working with Hollaback! Philly and other groups to address the issue. Great!

Congrats to Hollaback! Philly, and in particular to Rochelle, for doing all the leg work and follow-up and organizing to make this happen and to make it successful!

Some of the people who testified or attended the City Council Hearing

 

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NYC: New App for Reporting Harassment

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Building on a recommendation from the SSH Book to document where street harassment is happening to better be able to address it, Hollaback! has teamed up with the New York City Council to launch the Hollaback! app.

Via Think Progress:

“The new app allows victims or witnesses to upload, in real time, information about where they experienced harassment on the street. It creates a map of pinned locations where harassment occurs, providing near-instant feedback to the city council’s and mayor’s offices. The app collects demographic data, too, to help officials better understand the details of where harassment occurs and who it happens to.”

This easier way to report incidents to Hollaback’s database and the option to report it to city council members has the potential to make a difference in how street harassment is documented and understood. It’s great that the app isn’t just for tracking gender-based street harassment, but also forms like racial harassment. It also lets you report harassment  you witness, not just what you experience.

However, it’s important to note that often the people who are most vulnerable to harassment may not have access to a phone with an app (such as young teenagers, homeless people, poor people) so they will still have a harder time reporting incidents.

And, city council speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn is the main backer of the app, yet she favors a form of street harassment: Stop and Frisk (which, as of last week, is now unconstitutional).

Via Jezebel:

“Mariame Kaba (@PrisonCulture), founder of Project NIA, an advocacy organization that supports youth in trouble with the law, argued in a series of tweets that it’s “not as simple as throwing around slogans about ‘keeping women safe.”

“Which women?” she asked. “What do you mean by ‘safe?; HOW are you proposing to create that safety? ALL of these questions are gendered, racialized + age-specific, geographically-specific, etc… It isn’t neat and it isn’t simple.”

Street harassment is complex and there are no easy answers for how to deal with it… in fact there will never be just one answer because it impacts so many groups of people in various communities differently.

I do see it as promising that city council members want to address this issue, and I hope they will listen to the concerns of people like Kaba so they can improve their efforts and make them more inclusive and effective. It will be interesting to see how the app is used and what impact it may or may not have on stopping street harassment.

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Canada: They Asked for the Numbers

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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.

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USA: Empowerment Through Solidarity at Holla:Revolution

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By: Maggie Freleng, NYC, USA, SSH Correspondent

Hollaback! Brussels

“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
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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.

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