Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

15-Year-Old Girl Killed by Street Harasser

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Trigger Warning — Murder

Via Indian Express:

“A 15-year-old girl was shot dead allegedly by a man who had been harassing her for sometime, police said. Accused Kuldeep and his aide Pujari have been arrested…

Prinki, who worked as a domestic help, was yesterday returning home with her sister when Kuldeep along with his aides stopped them, they said. According to the victim’s sister, Kuldeep soon took out a gun and shot at Prinki, police said.”

Another senseless death because of sexism, gender-based violence, street harassment — the third I’ve read about so far in 2016. My heart goes out to her friends and family.

May justice be served in her memory.

 

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High School Girl Sets Self on Fire

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In India, a 17-year-old student poured kerosene on herself and set herself on fire because she was so upset over being repeatedly harassed by two boys on her way to school at Sunrakh village. She’s been admitted into the hospital in critical condition and the police are working to arrest the accused boys.

We hope she will survive and can heal from both the emotional and physical harm.

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Calling out #ShirtlessShamers

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Our ally Lindsey of Cards Against Harassment wrote an excellent guest piece for The Daily Beast. Here are two excerpts:

“This January I started #ShirtlessShamers2016, a Twitter hashtag in which I juxtapose men’s sexist, slut-shaming social media posts about women’s bodily respectability with their own bare-chested pictures. This isn’t my first adventure in challenging misogyny through social media; you may also remember me from such other controversial positions as, “Street Harassment: Please Stop Doing It.” …

When I started using the #ShirtlessShamers2016 hashtag, I expected things to stay funny. Light. Playful. Sexism and gender-based double standards aren’t really funny, of course, but lampooning shirtless broskies who are heavy on ego and light on self-awareness has a certain silliness to it. They flex their pecs and regurgitate some casual misogyny, and we marvel, bemused, that they aren’t in on the joke.

But, as is often the case, we laugh to keep from crying.

I am about five weeks into the hashtag, with more than 100 posts (conveniently gathered here for your viewing pleasure) and the recurring themes are far from funny….

ShirtlessShamers

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a problem of young men being doofuses. The double standard is pervasive, and touches on the fundamental right for girls and women to be in their own bodies without being deemed provocative and inappropriate and at risk. That right matters. It matters for all women but especially for black women and girls, whose bodies are hypersexualized from very young ages. It matters for people like my sister, who has had strangers chastise her for breastfeeding her infant even as men jog half-naked nearby. It matters in how we continue to talk about street harassment as a problem related to clothing choices or other respectability proxies, no matter how many marketable white women go viral for reminding us street harassment happens to women in t-shirts and jeans.

This issue also matters for people like me who have survived sexual violence and routinely run into uninformed rape apologists and enablers who desperately want to prop up a myth that sexual violence is a problem contributed to by clothing or other victim choices. (It’s not.) It matters for people who have been bullied and shamed by their classmates and schools for the crime of developing parts unilaterally declared to be inappropriate or distracting. (They’re not.) It matters for people in the sex industry who are treated as if they shed their humanity when they shed their clothing. (They don’t.) The list goes on. Holding men and women’s bodies to a different standard as far as nudity and sexuality is concerned matters for everyone who has come to accept that no amount of fabric can fix an underlying culture problem.”

Thank you for all you do, Lindsey, to call out double standards and fight for women’s right to respect and dignity!

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Renewed Efforts to Address Harassment on the NYC Subway

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More efforts are underway in New York City to address sexual harassment on the subway system. This includes training transit police, with input from Hollaback!

Here’s some info about it overall, via the New York Times:

“Opportunistic sex crimes aboard subways are not new, nor are they news to many women. Some have been grabbed or leered at by a man who is masturbating. Many others have heard a story from a friend who felt an uncomfortable touch but was unsure if she should say something.

But cellphone cameras and social media have given women tools to fight back and provided the police a way to identify some offenders. Last year, in an effort to encourage more victims to come forward, the police began training more female officers to work the cases.
 
The police now send out a steady stream of alerts about such crimes using photos from victims’ phones to try to identify suspects. One recent Twitter post shared a photo of a man suspected of grabbing a 27-year-old woman’s buttocks on a No. 7 train in Queens this month. Two days earlier, the police posted a photo of a man who they say exposed himself to women on two trains at Grand Central Station.
 
Reported sex crimes on the subways rose 19 percent last year, to 738 from 620 in 2014. Many of those crimes were forcible touching and public lewdness, the offenses most commonly charged in connection with the sort of sexual misconduct that Detective Cross and his colleagues were on the lookout for that morning on the Lexington Avenue line.
 
Joseph Fox, the chief of the Transit Bureau, said he believed the increase in reported sex crimes was a result of more women coming forward. He expects the number of reports will keep rising as the police continue to talk about the problem.”
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Amsterdam Considers an Anti-Street Harassment Law

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A member of Straatintimidatie speaking at an event with the Amsterdam mayor. Image via their Facebook page.
A member of Straatintimidatie speaking at an event with the Amsterdam mayor. Image via their Facebook page.

Our friends at Burgerinitiatief Boete op Straatintimidatie in the Netherlands (read an interview with founder Gaya Branderhorst) told me that they recently had a discussion on street harassment and swayed the mayor of Amsterdam to address it, including by crafting legislation.

Via Dutch News, here is more info:

“One in three women reports being hassled, spat at or insulted while out in the Dutch capital but this is not currently an offence. Now the local branch of the right-wing VVD wants to change this by amending local laws to cover street intimidation.

The city’s mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, told councillors on Thursday: ‘This sort of behaviour goes against the key values of our society.’

‘And it happens a lot,’ the mayor said. ‘However, there are practical implications because it is difficult to prove and there are often no witnesses.’ Nevertheless, the mayor said he would ask the police and pubic prosecution department to look into the options.

The issue was first raised in Amsterdam by VVD councillor Dilan Yesilgoz at the end of last year. Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch is already working on draft legislation to make verbal harassment of women a criminal offence.”

Portugal just passed a law against street harassment.

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