Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

UK: This Doesn’t Mean a Yes Campaign

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4.11.15 London - ThisDoesntMeanAYes“A short skirt is not a yes.
A red lip is not a yes.
A wink is not a yes.
A slow dance is not a yes.
A walk home is not a yes.
A drink back at mine is not a yes.
A kiss on the sofa is not a yes.
The only ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’.”

On the eve of International Anti-Street Harassment Week, our friends Rape Crisis UK teamed up with fashion photographer PEROU on new campaign #ThisDoesntMeanYes to dispel the myths around what constitutes consent. They photographed nearly 200 women and officially launched the campaign at www.thisdoesntmeanyes.com on April 15.

In their press release they wrote: “PEROU photographed women who were chosen at random in a pop-up street studio, capturing and empowering each individual in a composition that each felt natural to them. Our aim: to show through our collection of images, that no matter what a woman is wearing, she is never ‘asking for it’ and the mentality ‘she wants it’ is fundamentally wrong.”

Rape Crisis UK explained: ‘No one should be able to blame rape on a short skirt. A short skirt can’t talk – a short skirt can’t say yes’.

Join the campaign by posting your image on social media using #thisdoesntmeanayes.

4.11.15 London - ThisDoesntMeanAYes from PRThe four women behind the campaign are: Nathalie Gordon is an Advertising Creative, Lydia Pang is a Creative Art Commissioner, Abigail Bergstrom is a Commissioning Book Editor and Karlie McCulloch is an Illustration Agent.

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Los Angeles Metro Commits To Fighting Sexual Harassment

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(Photo by Juliet Bennett Rylah/LAist)

Great news out of Los Angeles! The LA Metro has launched a new campaign called “Its Off Limits” to dissuade harassment on trains and buses and encourage victims to report.

The campaign follows a recent survey that found that while approximately 20% of LA Metro’s 22,604 riders have experienced sexual harassment during their commute, only 99 people reported this behavior in the past year.

With the new campaign, victims can report harassment either using a special hotline or a phone app.

The campaign officially launches tomorrow with a press release at 11am at Union Station, though the posters are up today!

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Study: All Women In France have been Harassed on Public Transit

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More soon, but quickly wanted to share that the first report on gender harassment and sexual violence on public transport across France was released today.  It found that ALL of the more than 600 women surveyed had experienced it at least once in their life on public transportation. In half of the cases, the victims were minors when it first occurred.

Via English RFI:

“You ask a woman, ‘Have you been a victim of harassment or violence in public transportation?’ And she will say, ‘No, not at all’,” explains Elisabeth Moiron-Braud. “But then you ask, ‘Has a man ever pressed up against you or put his hand on your bottom?’ And she will say, ‘Yes!’”

Moiron-Braud is a lawyer who worked on the report for the High Council on Equality between Men and Women (HCEfh) which was presented to the deputy minister for women’s rights, Pascale Boistard.

It is aimed at tackling the range of sexual harassment and assault on public transportation, from catcalls at bus stops, to groping in the metro, to rape in train cars.

The report calls these behaviours “manifestations of sexism” which affect women’s rights to feeling secure, and which limit their use of public space and their ability to move around.

The challenge is identifying the problem. Catcalls can be considered by women and men as flirtation; groping is seen as so common as to not warrant a complaint.

“Women are used to it,” says Laure Salmona, of the Association Mémoire Traumatique et Victimologie, a victims’ rights advocacy group.”

High Council for equality between women and men plans to launch a comprehensive national campaign around harassment on buses, subways and trains next month. To my knowledge, France would be the first country to do this across the whole country!!

H/T Dan Moshenberg

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New Resource for Runners in Philadelphia

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Credit: Samantha Varnum

Alon Abrahamson is the creator of the Philadelphia-based running website Run Philly and created an “Incident Report” page that allows runners to log in incidents of harassment, physical assault, muggings and more that happen while they are running.

Via Runner’s World:

““These incidents must happen every single day, multiple times per day,” Abramson told Runner’s World Newswire. “I want to provide a mechanism to capture that. In doing so, we would actually have material to give to decision-makers and people with actual power to makes some changes like fixing bad intersections or putting out more patrols. It’s a bit of a civic experiment.”

After crowdsourcing data through this fall, Abramson will create a heatmap, which will ideally reveal hotspots of trouble for runners in Philadelphia.”

H/T Michelle Hamilton

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