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One Week Until Anti-Street Harassment Week 2021!

April 4, 2021 By HKearl

Dear Friends, 

My body is not public property.

The results of a groundbreaking street harassment survey conducted by our partner L’Oreal Paris of 14,000 women in 14 countries will be released for International Anti-Street Harassment Week (April 11-17).

The findings highlight how global this human rights violation is and also includes statistics from the pandemic year. They show how much this issue continues to affect people everywhere, even during this unusual global health crisis.

Indeed, street harassment is an on-going global health crisis. This is evident by the recent statistics and campaigns around the world that document it and work to end it.

  • In Dublin, Ireland, 6 out of 10 women and girls under 20 say they faced street harassment just during the previous week. A group of teenage girls is working to address this problem.
  • Across the U.S., Stop APPI Hate said there were 3,800 reports of harassment and hate by Asian-Americans, with women comprising 68% of those reports, including street harassment incidents.
  • The UK is grappling with how to make public spaces safer after a police officer murdered Sarah Everard on her way home.
  • Women across India spoke out to demand a safe Holi holiday.
  • Women in Calgary, Canada, are speaking out against harassment in their community.
  • Anti-harassment transit campaign informed by the experiences of teenager girls in the California Bay Area, U.S.

Will you join us next week in speaking out against this human rights violation? Use the hashtag #stopstreetharassment and tag @pinthecreep and @stopstharassmnt on social media.

Need an Idea? — Submit to the Safecity Campaign
Safecity is inviting people to participate in Week by submitting quotes for posters they’ll create and share on social media.

“This year the campaign is Confidence is Beautiful. Confidence to walk down a street without worry, confidence to loiter in public spaces, confidence to travel further to explore work, leisure and more. But that cannot happen if streets are not safe. We need to spotlight the issue, create urgency to act and encourage men to take action.” Submit your quotes and pictures here.

Need another Idea? — Share Your Pandemic Street Harassment Stories
Share your experiences and stories with street harassment across the pandemic – and/or submit artwork to stopstreetharassment@gmail.com.

Sexual Assault Awareness Month
In the U.S., April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Learn more about how to get involved with this month-long campaign. April 6 is the Day of Action — find ways to participate.

“Support Survivors During Sexual Assault Awareness Month”

Anti-SH Week Partners
Thank you to Safecity/Red Dot Foundation, Catcalls of NYC and L’Oreal Paris for partnering with us this year. Over the week, you can take part in L’Oréal Paris and Hollaback! training on how to safely intervene if you witness or experience street harassment.

Watch the Catcalls Turns 5 Event
If you missed our joint event with Catcalls of NYC for their 5th anniversary, you can watch it here! What an empowering and uplifting program.

Thank you! 

-Holly

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Filed Under: anti-street harassment week, News stories, street harassment Tagged With: campaign, catcalls, sarah everard

We All Want to Make It Home Safely

March 12, 2021 By HKearl

This week, 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard’s remains were found in the UK after she went missing last week. She was attacked and murdered while traveling home from a friend’s house. A police officer was arrested on suspicion of her murder.

Her story is tragic — and it’s the worst-case scenario that makes so much street harassment unnerving. We wonder: which harassers might escalate their behavior and strike us, follow us, grab us, assault us and even kill us?

Her story also confirms that police officers may NOT be people we can turn to for help and protection… instead they may ignore, blame, harass, assault or even kill us.

Since Sarah went missing, thousands of women have shared their own stories of assault and street harassment by men. A new representative study in the UK released this week backs up their stories – 97% of young women have faced sexual harassment and 80% of all women have experienced street harassment.

Of course, street harassment is a global problem, a global crisis, and these figures and stories in the UK are just the latest documentation of it.

During our collective year of global health pandemic, the issue of street harassment has often become a lower priority, a lesser problem to address, but Sarah’s story shows that street harassment is also deadly. The study shows that street harassment is also a far-reaching crisis.

Share Your COVID Street Harassment Stories
Ahead of International Anti-Street Harassment Week (April 11-17), we invite you to share your experiences and stories with street harassment across the pandemic – and/or submit artwork to stopstreetharassment@gmail.com.
We’ll share them across the week to help raise awareness that this is STILL a critical issue that we must address, we must work to stop.

And we must hold men — yes, all men — accountable for the culture they directly or indirectly contribute to and benefit from that turns women into prey who cannot safely walk home.

Anti-Street Harassment Week Partners & Activities
Thank you to Safecity/Red Dot Foundation, Catcalls of NYC, Hollaback! and L’Oreal Paris as well as other partners for their help this year’s Week of Action!!

As a reminder, we imagine much of the world will still be practicing social distancing next month, and so we encourage you to engage in online action (and use the hashtag #StopStreetHarassment) or, if it’s safe to do so, take small offline actions, like go with a friend or two to chalk on sidewalks or post flyers in your community. 

If you have ideas already, you can let us know what you’ll do by filling out this form, and you can let us know if you’d like to be listed on the website as a participating co-sponsor, stopstreetharassment@gmail.com.


March 27 Event
Catcalls of NYC turns 5 years old this month and we’ll be hosting their anniversary event on our Facebook Page on March 27. More details to come!

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Filed Under: anti-street harassment week, COVID19, News stories, police harassment, street harassment Tagged With: police, research, sarah everard, share stories, street harassment

2010s: The Decade Street Harassment Was Taken More Seriously

December 30, 2019 By HKearl

As the decade of the 2010s ends, I am amazed by how much progress we saw regarding street harassment, and notably, how much more seriously it was taken by governments, organizations, journalists, academics and individuals.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that street harassment is an old issue, and one that women have worked to address in various ways for decades. Their action ranged from individual efforts like warding off harassers with parasols and poking gropers with hatpins to collective action like forming self-defense and anti-harassment clubs to organizing boycotts and protests.

A big difference between these prior efforts and current ones is the Internet and our ability to document harassment with video recordings and photos, spread stories and information widely and collaborate and organize efforts in larger ways.

In the 2010s, we saw how people’s increased access to the Internet, mobile phones and social media helped propel efforts to prevent and stop street harassment. For instance, viral videos in places like Brussels, Peru and the U.S. spurred laws, studies and more social understanding of the problem. The widely shared stories of the bus gang rape and murder in Delhi and the mob attacks on women protesters at Tahrir Square in Cairo and the New Year’s Eve street attacks in Germany brought outrage, protests, and action. Many times, tweet chats and threads about street harassment spurred news stories.

Overall, the greater visibility of street harassment – and more recognition of the negative outcomes it has on people and communities – inspired individual and collective action, led to new efforts by government agencies and international NGOs, prompted more studies and books on the topic, changed how journalists write about the topic, and more.

Seven Examples of Progress and Change in the 2010s:*

  1. Anti-street harassment groups created by women who were fed up blossomed across the world, including the Observatorio Contra el Acoso Callejero (OCAC) network in Latin America, ProChange in Germany and the Stop Harcelement de la Rue in France, and a slew of groups in Egypt and India. These groups have helped pass laws, organized art and street events, held workshops, educated lawmakers and police officers, and more. Recently, Catcalls of NYC has inspired around 100 similar efforts in other parts of the world, where individuals go to the streets and use chalk to write the words street harassers uttered to them in order to take back their power and raise awareness.
  2. UN Women launched a Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces programme in 2010, shared specific guidance to all member states on addressing street harassment in 2013, and included safety in public spaces as a measure of success for the Sustainable Development Goals that were finalized in 2016.
  3. Several governments passed national or city-level laws on street harassment, including in countries like Belgium, France, Peru, Philippines, and the US. In the US, several city council hearings occurred on the topic for the first time, starting in Oct. 2010 in New York City. In the US, various transit agencies launched anti-harassment campaigns for the first time, like in Washington DC and Los Angeles, while agencies like Boston and Chicago released new efforts to their existing campaigns.
  4. Many anti-harassment and anti-violence organizations, including ones on college campuses, began doing much more to include street harassment on the continuum of gender-based violence and to at least mention it or acknowledge the connection in their other work. Just this year, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network added a page on street harassment to their website.
  5. More organizations that focus on issues affecting girls are tackling street harassment. Notably, Plan International has a large campaign now and has done lots of research on the topic. The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is another example.
  6. There were more academic studies conducted in places like the US, UK and Australia on street harassment – or on sexual harassment or sexism more broadly with street harassment as a subset – that show how and why it’s a serious issue that must be addressed. While before 2010, there was only one book solely about street harassment and only  a handful that addressed it in some way, there were several books released about it in the 2010s, including three books that I authored.
  7. The way most news media covers street harassment shifted this decade. It is much rarer for journalists and outlets to portray it as a compliment, minor annoyance or no big deal (for instance, like in this CNN article from 2008) and instead it is portrayed as a serious issue. Instead, it is recognized as something wrong, something that has a negative affect on people, and something that should change.

SSH and the 2010s:

The 2010s were big for Stop Street Harassment, too, especially considering we do not have any full-time or paid staff. For instance, this decade, we launched International Anti-Street Harassment Week (2011), oversaw the first nationally representative study on street harassment in the US (2014) and launched the world’s first street harassment hotline (2016). We oversaw several years of Blog Correspondent cohorts, funded more than dozen Safe Public Spaces Mentoring teams, and had close to 2 million visitors to our website (we changed web platforms in May 2011 and our analytics show 1.74 million visitors since then).

Personally, in the 2010s, I authored around 80 op-eds on street harassment alone, gave over 150 talks, and responded to over 350 media interviews – all of which helped raise the visibility of the issue. I also did consulting for entities like UN Women and US Dept of State on the topic and gave pro bono advice to places like Runner’s World, Google and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

What Will the 2020s Bring?

Looking ahead to the 2020s, I’m not sure what to expect. The biggest burst of changes and actions around street harassment globally (e.g. in UN policies) and  in the U.S. occurred between 2010-2016. Once street harassment becomes part of policies, there isn’t as much work to do – the goal was met, to some extent.

Additionally, I think things like Donald Trump being elected president in the U.S., anti-migrant policies globally, and growing awareness of climate change/climate crisis has taken some focus away from street harassment. I also think the #MeToo movement has taken a lot of attention away from street harassment and placed it more fully on workplace sexual harassment. This is despite our two recent studies showing that street harassment is the form of harassment most frequently experienced by persons of all genders and the one that people are most likely to experience first. Thus, with these patterns already established, I’m not sure what changes we’ll see regarding street harassment in the coming decade.

But, I do think we’ll see some changes. For instance, each year for International Anti-Street Harassment Week, when I think, oh, this issue isn’t as interesting to people anymore, groups in upwards of 30 countries still take part. New groups and efforts continue to emerge. Newer social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are places where a lot of the awareness-raising occurs. So, perhaps in the 2020s, we will see activism in new countries that haven’t had it before – and we will see people share stories who haven’t shared them before, likely on whatever new platform comes out!

Also, I think what reflecting on history tells us is, there will be ebbs and flows in widespread focus on issues. The Internet will help us continue to share our stories and keep attention on street harassment to varying degrees, even when we’re in an ebbing period of overall less attention on the issue.

Personally, what I’d love to see happen in the 2020s is schools tackle the issue through sex education / life skills courses, and organizations that work with boys and young men to talk about the topic with them head-on. We need to break the cycle of harassment and end the socialization that tells boys it’s okay and the right way to treat others. I’d also love to see more PSAs about street harassment go up in communities encouraging people to stand up and speak out when they see harassment occurring, and to see more entities undertake anti-street harassment efforts that don’t involve criminalization (like efforts the DC Government and Runner’s World/Women’s Health recently launched, as examples).

What do you see as the 2010s highlights for stopping street harassment and what are your wishes and hopes for 2020?

 

*Note: You can read more about many of these events and efforts — and more — in my 2015 book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World.

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Filed Under: News stories, Resources, SH History, SSH programs, street harassment, year end Tagged With: 2010s, decade, wrap-up

Study: Sexism like Street Harassment Affects Young Women

December 2, 2019 By HKearl

Via Refinery29:

“Young women who experience sexism are five times more likely to suffer from clinical depression, a new study has found.
The study also found that women aged between 18 and 30 are more likely than those in any other age group to experience sexism – be it at school, work, on public transport, in taxis or outside of the home.
More than four in five young women who said they’d experienced sexism reported being subjected to street harassment.
“I think it’s easier for people to get away with sexism in public because harassing a stranger doesn’t usually have any consequences,” a panel member told the Young Women’s Trust and University College London, who jointly conducted the study. “The victim doesn’t know the other person and probably won’t see them again later.”
The study also found that young women aged between 18 and 30 who experienced sexism were most likely to report mental health problems four years later. Another panel member said: ‘Sexism sits in the core of you and if you try and ignore it and don’t address it, it rots away and the problems permeate to other areas of your life.'”
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Filed Under: News stories, Resources, street harassment Tagged With: sexism, study, young women

Adult Men, Stop Harassing Girls!

July 14, 2019 By HKearl

Street harassment is a big problem in our country, especially for young women and girls. According to our nationally representative surveys, 71% of women have faced sexual harassment in public spaces, and most harassed women say their first incident of sexual harassment took place when they were a teenager or younger.

Twitter user @heterochromance asked women about their first street harassment experience a few days ago, and quickly her thread drew more than 6,000 comments. She specifically asked women about adult men catcalling them in light of multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein being arrested on sex trafficking charges. His victims were as young as 14 years old.

Men like Epstein and singer R. Kelly, who was recently arrested for various charges of abusing women and girls, are not an anomaly for preying on girls. They may just be an anomaly for the extent to which they did so – and for how long they got away with it.

In the nearly 13 years that I have been researching, writing and speaking out about street harassment, I have noticed that this is a common theme when women recall their early experiences with street harassment. The perpetrators were not usually boys their own age, but instead, men. A few weeks ago, I created an online survey to investigate this. Here are the results, with a few points highlighted below.

Around 250 people took the online survey, and 94% identified as female. When asked about their age at the time of their first experience of street harassment, they were quite young. Almost 70% said they were 13 years old or younger. Another 24% percent said they were 14 to 16 years old.

When asked about the age of their harassers (nearly all of whom were identified as male), the age difference was alarming; 55% said the men were in their 30s or older. Specifically:

  • 8% said the men were in their 50s
  • 20% said the men were in their 40s
  • 27% said the men were in their 30s
  • 22% said the men were in their 20s
  • 12% said the boys were in their teens, but older than them
  • 7% said the boys were their same age

The remaining 4% of respondents said the harassers were either younger than them or older than 50s. Again, most girls were elementary or middle school age and nearly all of them were high school age or younger at the time.

Around 80% of respondents said this first incident of street harassment caused them to feel less safe in the world afterward, and 54% said it caused them to change their life in some way.

This is truly horrible and should be unacceptable in our society. We must end our culture of male privilege that allows adult men to prey on girls, often with impunity!!

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Filed Under: News stories, Resources, SSH programs, Stories, street harassment Tagged With: age, girls, men, predators, prey, survey results

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