Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Egyptians address street harassment over Eid

By

For Muslims, the Eid-al-Fitr holiday ending the holy month of Ramadan should be a joyous one, but in Egypt, there always seems to be a spike in street harassment.

For two years, the group Shoft Taharosh (I Saw Harassment) has taken it upon themselves to monitor high trafficked areas to look out for harassment so they can prevent it or intervene. They said they intervened in 35 incidents during the three days of Eid, Monday to Wednesday, meaning they either prevented an incident or rescued a victim. They also distributed 4,000 leaflets about the legal penalties against street sexual offeses and numbers of hotlines.

The Egyptian government has been addressing this problem too.

The Interior Ministry, in charge of security in Egypt, set up an anti-harassment unit — “Department of Combat of Violence against Women”. The unit was deployed on busy streets and outside theaters during the three-day Eid. “These forces, supported by female police, will eliminate the phenomenon of harassment and violence against women,” Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim said. On Monday alone, they arrested six young men.

Share

Vancouver Transit Police Agree to Change their PSA

By

Advertisement by the Vancouver Transit Police. Photograph by Anoushka Ratnarajah.

The Vancouver Transit Police have been working to address sexual harassment and assault on their system. Their latest effort included this poster, which suggests that not reporting an assault is the real shame (as opposed to the assault) and ignores valid reasons why someone may choose not to report.

Vancouver-based artist Anoushka Ratnarajah shard the poster’s message on Instagram and Ms. Magazine and other outlets covered the story at the end of last week. The Vancouver chapter of Hollaback! issued a powerful statement to the Vancouver Transit Police and Lucia Lorenzi wrote an excellent essay about the ads, Lost in Translation: What The Vancouver Transit Police Advertisement Teaches Us About Language Use.

Thankfully, the Vancouver Transit Police issued an apology: as the CBC reports, they will be taking these posters down, and replacing them.

Hollaback! Vancouver shared this on their site today:

“Anne Drennan of the Vancouver Transit Police (VTP) called Shannon Fisher, Hollaback! Vancouver Team Lead, last night to apologize and say that the VTP will have the victim-shaming ads down by the end of the week as train cars return to service yards.

Anne spent the day calling everyone who complained about the ads to apologize for the harmful messaging. The VTP didn’t mean to blame victims, and they genuinely wish to encourage people — victims and bystanders — to report what they see as they feel comfortable and safe.

Anne invited Hollaback! Vancouver to be on a team with other women’s support groups to approve the copy on replacement ads. We said, yes!

Thanks to everyone who saw something and said something. Together we made change. Let’s keep using our voices until street harassment and the culture that supports it is no longer tolerated.

Thank you VTP for being swift and respectful. We’re thankful for the effort of the VTP, the See Something Say Something campaign, and the ways you’re willing to include us to make it as effective as possible. If you see something on transit, say something by texting 87-77-77.”

Share

Stopping Harassment at Comic-Con

By

Via Geeks for CONsent’s Facebook Page

In San Diego, there are 130,000 people at Comic-Con International, a place, the LA Times says, “where fans celebrate superheroes and science fiction and Hollywood studios promote their upcoming geek-friendly fare. As comic book characters have broadened, so too has their fan base. More women have begun attending Comic-Con in recent years, and now comprise about 40% of convention-goers, according to Glanzer.”

But even with the increase in women attending, sexual harassment continues to be a problem. For example, Janelle Asselin, who the LA Times writes “has edited comics for DC and Disney, said she has been groped at half a dozen conventions. She said a male comic book artist once told her he would like to eat her ‘like a pie,’ and she received rape threats in comments posted online after she had written a critique of a comic on her blog.”

In response, our friends at Feminist Public Works/Geeks for CONsent submitted a petition with 2,500 signatures calling on organizers to post signs in the convention halls detailing its anti-harassment policies. It also wants convention volunteers trained on how to respond to harassment incidents.

Comic-Con feels it’s already doing enough as they “already posts its policy, that “harassing or offensive behavior will not be tolerated,” on its website and in a printed events guide.”

Geeks for CONsent disagree and since Comic-Con isn’t doing more, they are in San Diego now, handing out anti-sexual harassment information to attendees. They’ve also developed an anti-harassment training manual for convention use. We support them in their effort!

Share

Serial Groper on NYC Subway Stops Because of PSAs

By

DISGUSTING AND DESPICABLE!!! Via NY Daily News:

“For decades, John had a routine: Get up. Get dressed. Look for someone to sexually abuse on the way to work.

“I’d go into the subway thinking, ‘I’m going to find someone to touch’ and invariably I would,” John said. “If I didn’t, I just didn’t. But I usually had some kind of opportunity.”

A Daily News analysis of subway crime last month revealed women reported being victims of subway perverts more than 3,000 times during a five-year period ended in July 2013.

The NYPD Transit Bureau made an arrest in a majority — 67% — of those cases, Chief Joseph Fox said.

Unfortunately, John never felt the cold steel of handcuffs. He never spent time in a concrete jail cell with a bunch of bigger and bolder predators who would knock his teeth out just to pass the time.

“I never got arrested,” he said. “I only had a few really bad incidents. The worst was one in which a woman glared at me and said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ ”

John started slithering through crowded trains looking for “targets” when he got his first job making deliveries by subway, he said. He was 16. He continued while commuting to a white-collar job, and then into retirement, he said…

This subway sicko claimed he stopped three years ago.

That’s when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began broadcasting announcements urging riders to tell a transit worker or cop if they were a sex abuse victim or a witness to a sex crime. The fear of getting caught and exposed in a police crackdown became too great to continue, John said.

So let the crackdown begin. Put cameras in trains, triple undercover sting operations, post photos of repeat offenders in stations.”

It’s good to know at least one sexual abuser has stopped thanks to the PSAs… but it also makes me wonder if he’s just shifted to abusing women in other spaces instead.

Share