Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
Our new board member Patrick suggested creating a web section of the SSH site specific to the experiences of members of the LGBQTIA community. Great idea!
As a first step, we’re inviting anyone who identifies as an individual within the LGBQTIA community to share their street harassment story or stories. So if this is you, please take a few minutes to share a story and invite friends to do the same.
Let’s make these stories, which are too often invisible, visible!
I’m so excited to announce that Patrick Ryne McNeil has agreed to join the SSH board of directors!
I first met Patrick almost three years ago when I spoke to his class at George Washington University, where he was a master’s student in the same public policy/women’s studies program I went through a few years earlier. Soon after, he submitted a street harassment story to the SSH blog and decided to write his master’s thesis on the street harassment of gay and bisexual men, a groundbreaking topic.
Since then, he’s written for the SSH blog, been featured on the blog, and we’ve collaborated on events and focus groups. In addition to being a smart and compassionate person, I am excited he will bring so much knowledge about the street harassment of gay and bisexual men to the board and to SSH’s work.
Meet Patrick:
A native of Pennsylvania, Patrick Ryne McNeil works in communications at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where he writes on a range of social justice issues. After completing a bachelor’s degree in English and Communications with a minor in Sociology at Marymount University in Arlington, VA, Patrick went on to The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for a master’s in Women’s Studies, where he wrote his thesis on the street harassment of gay and bisexual men. Patrick has written for the Huffington Post, Washington Blade, Feministe, Fem2.0, Role/Reboot, and the Stop Street Harassment blog, and was awarded SSH’s Safe Public Spaces Trailblazer award in 2013 for his street harassment-related work.
“I am beyond excited to start working with Stop Street Harassment in this more official role and to join a board with so many incredible activists. While I’ve helped in the past year with tweet chats, blog posts, and a focus group, joining the board has already sparked within me an even greater passion for organizing around this issue and affecting meaningful change.” ~ Patrick
Welcome, Patrick!
It’s #GivingTuesday! If you’ve ever been street harassed or if one of your loved ones has been, please consider donating $10 or more to help fund the first-ever national study on street harassment. We need this data to better address the issue. We’re only about $21,000 away from our goal!!!
The study will include a 2,000 person national survey (which is why it costs so much) as well as 10 focus groups with under-represented voices. Already, we’ve done these focus groups with Native Americans in South Dakota, queer women of color in New York, and GBTQ men in Washington, D.C., as well as some regional focus groups in places like Los Angeles and Brooklyn.
There are various perks you’ll get in return for your donation, including a signed copy of the new book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers!
With your donation, you can make a difference in people’s lives, especially the next generation of girls and boys. Everyone deserves to be safe in public spaces but it will take all of us to make that happen.
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.)
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!
By: Aikanysh Jeenbaeva, in collaboration with others from the BFCSQ, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, SSH Correspondents
Transgender people remain one of the most vulnerable groups of the population in Bishkek. Up to 90% of all transgender people experience constant pressure, violence and discrimination at the hands of relatives, acquaintances, law enforcement officials, medical professionals, complete strangers on the streets, etc.
The story below is told from the perspective of my fellow trans*activist, for whom harassment in public places is just one of the many facets of violence in his everyday reality.
“We get harassed by the police most often”, he says. “They come up to me or to my friends and start demanding to show identification. After seeing what they consider a discrepancy in the documents between indicated and real gender identity, they take us to the police station, where we are subject to more severe harassment in the form of humiliating interrogations and threats. One of the officers once said that people like me “are perverts and should be killed”.
This kind of attitude by the police officers is not only seen as normal, but also encouraged. Even if you call the MIA (the Ministry of Internal Affairs) hotline to report police misconduct and brutality, they hang up on you upon hearing that this was done on the basis of gender identity.
You never feel safe and you are never protected. Home is not a place where you feel loved and secure for a large part of my friends and myself and the streets are like a battlefield, where you never know when and who will accost you.
When I or my friends walk down the street, people usually stare at us trying to guess gender identity. Women (mainly) stare at the genital area trying to make out whether the transgender person has male or female genitals. People loudly comment my appearance, stop and start giggling or discussing between themselves whether I am a boy or a girl. And this is even worse for people who do not look masculine/feminine enough and thus do not fit into the cis-normative patriarchal gender binary.
Harassment is so normalized that people simply do not consider it as such. It is normal for them to come up to an unknown person and laughing, start asking whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. It is also normal for them to start contradicting you, if you choose to reveal your gender identity. They ask incredulously: “Do you really consider yourself a man?! But… just look at yourself!” I get called a hermaphrodite, a faggot, an “it”… there are so many insulting names that it won’t be possible to list them all here.
However, street harassment is not limited to staring or verbal abuse. Many of my friends have been harassed physically by strangers on the streets who have grabbed their chest to “check whether it is real or not”, have hit and beaten them.
Part of the harassment comes when people confuse transgender people with lesbians and gays, and in such a highly homophobic society as the Kyrgyzstani one is, you have to expect threats, loud insults, hateful and disgusted looks. And just imagine what happens to those who are non-heterosexual or queer transgender people…
When we gather as a group to go somewhere to eat or just hang out, we almost always get harassed. When it happens, some of the guys try to start a fight or curse back. Strange thing, if we react in an aggressive manner and yell or shout back at the people, that shuts most of the harassers up. This has led us to believe that the only language people understand is the language of violence and that it is the only efficient way to react. However, acting violently and aggressively in response to harassment makes you feel disgusted and angry that you have allowed yourself to get provoked once again.
Of course, not everyone can or wants to use the tactic. Some of my friends just gave up and stopped leaving home without any urgent need. The streets are a too scary and hostile place for them.
In the past, I used to react in a very angry manner. I was very upset after every such encounter and brooded over it for a long time. But after a while, I just stopped reacting to it. Now when someone makes a comment on the street, I simply pretend not to hear it. Still every time I experience it, it completely kills my mood and leaves me empty on the inside.
This is the society we live in — a discriminatory transphobic, homophobic, biphobic (add your description here) society. I know that tremendous efforts and time are needed to change it. But one thing that any person can do next time he/she has an urge to harass others on the street, is to think how it would feel, if you were in the place of that person.”
Aikanysh graduated from the University of Freiburg with a degree in European Literatures and Cultures and recently from the Diplomatic Academy of the KR with a degree in International Relations. Aikanysh is a co-founding member and coordinator of the Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ. Salidat is an undergraduate student at Kyrgyz National University and a dedicated volunteer at the Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ.
Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ was founded in 2012 by activists from various communities of Bishkek city. Follow BFC SQ on Twitter, @bish_feminists and on Facebook.