Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

CSW and International Women’s Day 2015

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Happy International Women’s Day! This is an important opportunity each year for raising awareness about issue that particularly affect women, such as street harassment.

As the author of this Time magazine article notes, we’ve made a lot of progress in the past few decades regarding the education of girls, women’s access to water, women’s leadership, and maternal mortality. BUT there are still gaps in these areas and HUGE gaps in areas like gender-based violence. So as always, there is a lot more work to do.

The day coincides with the start of UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York City and I am en route to attend the NGO CSW Consultation Day today. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN Women, will be one of the speakers and panelists from around the world will talk about the UN/international women’s movement from 1975-1995, the 1995 Beijing conference on women’s rights, what’s happened in the 20 years since then, and what comes next.

Starting at UN headquarters, an International Women’s Day march took place, concluding at Times Square around 4:30 p.m.

International Women's Day March
International Women’s Day March

Tomorrow I have various meetings — including at the UN — and also will attend the No Ceilings Full Participation Report release. From the event press release:

“The report is the culmination of a year-long, global data aggregation effort by the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with The Economist Intelligence Unit, UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center and Fathom Information Design. The report identifies the significant gains women and girls have made – and the gaps that still remain – since the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, when Secretary Clinton called on the international community to ensure “women’s rights are human rights.” Benchmarking process since that landmark event, No Ceilings is making the data open and accessible, and is pairing the report with an interactive, shareable collection of data visualizations. The data visualizations will highlight key findings from the data through interactive stories, as well as allow users the ability to explore the data on their own.”

Speakers will include Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, Melinda Gates, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia, Her Excellency Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, President of the Republic of Croatia, Malala Yousafzai, and Sheryl WuDunn.

I will tweet during (or soon after) the events (@hkearl) and blog about them on Tuesday, so stay tuned. 

CSW will last about two weeks and the parallel events hosted by NGOs are free and open to the public if you’re in the area and want to attend.

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Why researchers should focus on street harassment

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Our board member Dr. Laura S. Logan, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hastings College, wrote “Street Harassment: Current and Promising Avenues for Researchers and Activists” for the current issue of the academic journal Sociology Compass. In it she makes the case for why researchers in particular need to focus on street harassment. A short exceprt follows, here is the full article.

“…researchers should focus on street harassment for several reasons…because it is on a continuum of violence against and oppression of femininities and the people associated with femininities. It is also on a continuum of violence against people of color, particularly when we consider institutional racism and the risks of criminalization associated with being in public space if one is, for instance, a Black man or woman. Street harassment is part of a larger culture that values in deed if not always in word men’s sexually predatory behaviors, sexual assault against women and children, women’s subordination and marginalization in politics, the second shift and the wage gap, victim blaming, the murder of transgender women, bashing gay men, repelling girls from math and science before they even get to high school, increasingly limited access to reproductive health care, racial profiling, and more. Research indicates that street harassment limits women’s presence in public space – where the work of politics and social change is most likely to take place – and that women think about harassment, fear it, and plan for it, even in its absence (Gardner 1995). Street harassment is more than a nuisance, more than a threat, more even that the violence that sometimes accompanies it….

Street harassment conveys the message that harassers are entitled to own public space and in a sense to control and violate the people in that space. The message to targets of street harassment is that they should hide, be afraid, pay attention to what potential street harassers want them to do, and wear and say and be. Street harassment robs people of safety, agency, power, and opportunity. Increasingly, activists are writing about and rallying together to address street harassment. It is time that more researchers joined them.”

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#MySafetySelfie Project

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Conceived by site-specific narratologist and writer Jay Pitter, #mysafetyselfie is a project that is curating selfies + stories from women highlighting spatial and social factors compromising their safety in public spaces. After establishing a career as a public funder and then a corporate marketing communications director, Pitter earned a graduate degree at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Her experiences of compromised safety as a young person coupled with her passion for inclusive city building led her to focus her research on environmental design, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), and urban placemaking. Pitter is excited about the ways that #mysafetyselfies, can be used to create a space for women to participate in conversations pertaining to urban design, architecture, and public space policy. Also, she is adamant about presenting the stories of women in a high-quality, responsible and dignified manner. The goals of this project goes beyond the collection of selfies; Jay plans on creating an online platform, community engagement series, published work, exhibitions, and curricula.

Find out how YOU can participate. 

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Collaboration with Lyft

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Lyft connects people who need a ride with trained community drivers. Along with Collective Action for Safe Spaces and Hollaback!, next month SSH will be collaborating with Lyft on creating sexual harassment training videos for their drivers. They are also joining the White House It’s On Us campaign to address sexual violence. We are thrilled that Lyft is prioritizing this issue and committing to creating safer vehicles for passengers and drivers alike.

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New Anti-Harassment Ads on DC-Area Metro!

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Nearly three years after the first anti-harassment transit ads went up in the Washington, DC-area, I’m excited to announce that the second wave of ads are up! They are a collaboration between WMATA, Collective Action for Safe Spaces & SSH. #GoTeam

If you experience or witness harassment on the Metro, you can report by phone or text and online: www.wmata.org/harasssment. They are looking for patterns and hotspots, so please report if you have a moment (even incidents that happened in the past).

(Photo by Rebecca Henry)

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