Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

End of May News Round-Ups

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LeDajrick Cox. Image via The Grio

It’s with a heavy heart that I open this edition of the monthly news round-up with tragic news:

  • In Dallas, Texas, LeDajrick Cox, who just graduated from high school, and two male friends and a female friend were out celebrating. In a 7-11 parking lot, three men in another car started street harassing their female friend, and Cox intervened to defend her. Eventually, Cox and his friends left but the three men followed them and shot into the car. Cox and the two other young men were all injured and Cox died from his injuries. A young life is needlessly over. I applaud him for doing the right thing and am so saddened he is dead.
  • In Portland, Oregon, a white supremacist began harassing two young women on a train, using anti-Muslim slurs. One woman was wearing hijab. When three men intervened to help the young women, the man attacked, killing two of them and injuring one. Again this is just unbelievably horrific and sad. There have been many news stories about the tragedy and praise given to the three men. I glad they intervened but feel so saddened that for two of them, it cost them their lives. That never should have happened.
  • In College Park, Maryland, a white supremacist seemingly randomly stabbed and killed a recent African American college graduate near the University of Maryland campus.

Everyone should be safe in public spaces, and clearly we have a long, long ways to go until that will occur. I hope these stories don’t deter people from speaking out and helping people facing harassment and I hope that those who have committed these crimes face consequences and that perhaps those consequences will deter others from doing the same.

Here are highlights of other news from around the world this month:

The first mandatory legal mediation in the first ever street sexual harassment case in the country took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A woman in Adelaide, Australia, wrote about being scared to walk the streets of her own town after dark.

A study found that 23% of female commuters in Dhaka, Bangladesh, faces sexual harassment on the buses.

Men in Egypt are working with other men to discuss their role and actions as bystanders, perpetrators and victims of violence, including street harassment.

Outraged women in an eastern Parisian district of France staged demonstrations and launched an online petition over a “male den” where women are subject to harassment and sexist remarks.

A woman in Hong Kong spoke out against people who victim-blame women facing street harassment.

In India, the Alwar police formed an all-women team to crack down on people harassing women and girls on city streets.

School girls in India went on a hunger strike to protest the men who harassed them on their way to and from school and the lack of action by local officials to stop them.

In an informal survey conducted in Myanmar, more than 80% of women had faced street harassment.

Three women’s groups urged Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela Monday to sign a bill meant to prohibit and punish sexual harassment, stalking, sexism and racism in all areas.

The penalty for taking non-consensual upskirt photos increased in Thailand.

In the UK, a bar posted a sign to deter male customers from harassing the female bartender.

A new report from Harvard Graduate School of Education found that 87% of women in the U.S. have faced sexual harassment. Among 18 to 25 year olds, most said they had faced sexual harassment, including 41% saying a stranger had touched them without permission.

Prior to the Lightning in a Bottle music festival in Los Angeles (USA), there was a class offered for fans and staff about sexual harassment at festivals, “Creating Safer-Braver Spaces: Consent Culture & Social Care”.

Most U.S. cities were designed around men and it’s time for that to change.

In the U.S., Feminista Jones began responding to strange men who “complimented” her by agreeing… and then the men get mad. She said in an interview:

“For a man to be comfortable sending an unsolicited comment about your body via text or Tinder or Bumble or whatever, or to feel comfortable yelling some shit at you on the sidewalk, he has to feel — at least in some small way — like you exist for him. If you take those compliments in stride instead of blushing and cooing and being the Good Modest Woman he hopes your mother raised you to be, you’re proving you don’t exist for him at all. Your “great body” belongs to you, and of course that’s gonna piss this exact type of dude off.”

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Northern Ireland: “There’s no Excuse to be Doing Nothing”

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Elaine Crory, Belfast, Northern Ireland, SSH Blog Correspondent

A striking image taken in the city of Birmingham, England, went viral this week; a young woman, Saffiyah Khan, facing down a man from the far-right, xenophobic English Defense League (EDL). In the photo we can glimpse at least two EDL members, their jaws set, chins tilted up, they appear to be speaking to – or shouting at – Khan. We can also see a Police Liaison Officer, speaking to one of the EDL members. The young woman, however, is smiling serenely at the enraged man who is addressing her.

The image captured imaginations, and the story behind it is one activists can learn much from. It transpires that Khan was a bystander who stepped up to defend another woman, young British Muslim Saira Zafar, who was surrounded by EDL members, shouting at her to go back to where she came from. Both Khan and Zafar, not coincidentally, were born and raised in Birmingham. Birmingham is a large and diverse city, an industrial giant in its time, exactly the sort of place that the EDL believe is theirs, given their stated aim to whip up tensions between the Muslim population and the white population. With a smile, Khan showed them how wrong they are.

Bystander intervention is one of those things that anti-street harassment activists have been advocating for a long time. In surveys, most people who have experienced public harassment have said that they wish someone had intervened on their behalf. It doesn’t happen much, though. It’s not hard to see why in a way, sometimes it seems dangerous, sometimes we’re in a hurry, the whole thing is more trouble than it’s worth. At the most basic level, though, I suspect it’s because we are raised in a world that puts individual before community always, or that sees community as something narrow and divisive, us’uns versus them’uns, in local Belfast parlance.

But things have shifted recently. After the Brexit vote in the UK, there was an immediate increase in hate crime incidents. After Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential Election, sexist and xenophobic incidents increased, many citing Trump’s victory as evidence that “political correctness” had been defeated. One U.S. politician was arrested for grabbing a female colleague, pinching her genitals from behind, reminiscent of the president’s infamous “grab her by the pussy” comments. He did so after arguing with the woman in question and saying, “I love this new world. I no longer have to be politically correct”. The far right is on the march all across Europe, and while Geert Wilders was defeated in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen looks likely to lose the French Presidential election, the levels of support they have found is worrying, and it is spreading.

In this new world where racists, xenophobes, homophobes and misogynists feel emboldened, we can no longer stand by when people get assaulted and harassed daily on the grounds of race, gender and LGBTQ+ status. This is this generation’s great activist moment; in the words of Saffiyah Khan, interviewed along with Saira Zafar a few days after the incident, “there’s no excuse to be doing nothing”.

We must educate ourselves about intersectionality, too, and understand that oppression often thrives where identities intersect, making a woman of colour more likely to be targeted than a white woman, for instance. When we speak of bystander intervention, we often urge male allies to be aware of their power to step in and divert harassment, and to speak to their peers about the sexist attitudes that underpin street harassment. This applies to all of us; we must be aware of how and where we wield power, when our actions might have most impact. And once we have armed our minds, we must be willing to act.

Hollaback! Ottawa chalking on April 9

Hollaback! is currently hosting online webinars on bystander intervention, and you can sign up here. They have also produced useful infographics that we can learn from and share in our networks, summarising briefly the basics of bystander intervention; the 5 D’s:

  1. Direct – directly confronting or addressing harassers, as Khan did, provided it’s safe to do so
  2. Distract – get in the way, ask for directions, speak to the victim about something other than what’s happening
  3. Delegate – ask for assistance from a third party, a security guard or transport worker for instance
  4. Delay – after an incident has happened, check in with the victim, ask if they need any help, etc
  5. Document – use your phone to photograph or video what is happening, and make sure you approach the victim with your record to see if or how they want to use it

This is necessarily brief, and the tip of the iceberg. During International Anti-Street Harassment Week, activists the world over shared inventive ways of tackling the problem. The goal now must be to spread the knowledge, widen the practice, and stand up against the tide of hatred which challenges the progress we have made as a society. Psychologists have long observed the “bystander effect”, whereby the probability of a victim being helped is inversely proportional to the number of people who witness the abuse or harassment. Saffiyah Khan bucked that trend, standing up to a gang of thugs in the midst of a large crowd with nothing but a smile and the power of being on the right side of history. We can, indeed must, learn a lot from her.

Elaine is a part-time politics lecturer and a mother of two. She is director of Hollaback! Belfast, co-organises the city’s annual Reclaim the Night march, and volunteers with Belfast Feminist Network and Alliance for Choice to campaign for a broad range of women’s issues.

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Building Solidarity in a Fragmented Country

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Guest Post for International Anti-Street Harassment Week

By Sofia DiPasquale

Hollaback! is a global network of grassroots activists working to end all forms of harassment. We believe that everyone has the right to exist in public space without fear, and that bystander intervention and story-sharing are key to creating a harassment-free world. We’re hosting regular bystander intervention trainings to give people the tools and knowledge to act up and fight back against harassment when they see it happen. You can share stories of harassment or bystander intervention on our website.

Since the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., we’ve seen a spike in the amount of stories we’ve been receiving – particularly racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant harassment. Harassment disproportionately affects marginalized communities, especially people who face intersecting oppression. We recognize that not everyone feels safe intervening in every harassment situation, especially when you belong to the community that is being targeted. Our bystander intervention training outlines five options of ways to intervene, ranging from directly confronting the harasser to documenting the situation, so you always have a choice when you’re deciding the best way to respond.

Overwhelmingly, people sharing stories of harassment say that they wish someone had stepped in during the harassment or checked in with them after to let them know that someone has their back. We’re trying to get as many people trained up on bystander intervention as possible so we can begin to create communities where people affirm and protect each other in public space, and no one has to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. You can find out more bystander intervention resources here.

Sofia DiPasquale is a communications intern at Hollaback! If you’re in New York City, join their Anti-Street Harassment Week rally from 2-4 p.m. at Tompkins Square Park.

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Safety First: Street Harassment and Women’s Educational Choices in India

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Guest Post for International Anti-Street Harassment Week

By Girija Borker

Why do women in India choose to attend lower ranked colleges?

Is it because women have lower high school test scores? No.

Is it because of street harassment? YES.

Women studying in Delhi University (DU), one of the top universities in India, choose lower ranked colleges than men with the same high school test scores. This is despite the fact that women score higher on national high school exams than men. And this is true even for the smartest and the most ambitious women. My research aims to understand why women are making these choices and whether it is because women trade-off quality of education for safety from harassment.

DU is composed of 77 colleges and the colleges are spread across Delhi. The colleges vary in quality, with each college having its own campus, staff and classes. Undergraduate admissions in DU are centralized and primarily based on students’ high school test scores. I surveyed over 4,000 students at DU to collect information on students’ daily travel route, travel mode, their high school scores and exposure to street harassment. At DU, most students live with their parents and travel to college every day, predominantly by public transport. In my sample, over 70% of students live at home and of these around 80% use public transport to travel to college every day. Most women I surveyed have experienced some form of street harassment – 63% of women have experienced unwanted staring, 50% have received inappropriate comments, 27% have been touched inappropriately and 25% have been followed.

To determine how the risk of harassment during travel affects college choice, I combine safety data with information on students’ chosen travel route and alternative travel routes available. Safety data comes from SafetiPin, a map-based mobile application that allows users to characterize the safety of an area. Information on harassment by travel mode comes from Safecity, a mobile application that lets women share their stories of harassment in urban public spaces. I used Google Maps to map the route options available to each student for their travel to college every day.

Harassment risk and students’ chosen travel routes to a college in Delhi University.
My analysis indicates that avoidance behavior in response to street harassment can largely explain women’s choices. I found that women are willing to attend a college that is 6 ranks lower for a route that is 1 standard deviation safer. This means that if a woman must choose to travel daily to the number 1 ranked college but face a high probability of harassment, or commute to the 6th ranked college that incurs on average 1 standard deviation less of harassment, she will choose the 6th ranked college. Compared to men, women are willing to give up 4 more ranks for an additional standard deviation of safety. Even among individuals who chose the best college in their set of available choices, women spend Rs. 15,500 ($250) more than men in annual travel costs to take safer, but more expensive travel routes to college. This amount is equivalent to 6% of the average per capita annual income in Delhi.

This is the first study to assess the effects of street harassment on women’s college choice. The study highlights the degree to which the threat of street harassment holds back promising young women, even at a prestigious university in a modern city. The findings speak to the long-term consequences of everyday harassment – perpetuating gender inequality in education. Policy makers must realize that affirmative action for women is not enough unless we transform public spaces into enabling environments that are accessible to all.

Girija is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics at Brown University. She works primarily in the areas of gender economics, economics of education, and development economics. Girija grew up in Delhi and did her undergraduate studies from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi University.
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Tackling Street Harassment in Bristol

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Cross-posted from Zero Tolerance Bristol for International Anti-Street Harassment Week. By China Fish in Bristol, UK.

Report on Conference: ‘Safer for women’ – Tackling Misogyny and Street Harassment in Nottingham, September 2016.

Background to the conference

My name is China Fish and like many women, I have experienced frequent and unwanted sexual harassment as I walk our city streets. In 2010 I created a satirical performance about this very subject called ‘Lucky Saddle’, two words shouted at me by a man as I cycled in Bedminster when I was around 21 years old. It is an issue close to my heart, as, like most humans, I desire to be able to move freely and safely through the world I inhabit.

The response to the show was powerful; many women were relieved to find allies in their vocal sisters, and a lot of men were astonished to learn that this is something that happens to women. It is for many men, an invisible occurrence, as men who harass tend to refrain from such activity when other men are present. Such invisibility does little to protect women from these daily threats, as the severity of what is happening goes under the radar with almost no avenues for reporting or state protection. Currently, men who harass women are free to do so without any repercussions.

So where do we turn?

In January 2016, I met with Avon and Somerset Police and Crime Commissioner Sue Mountstevens to discuss the potential of criminalising street harassment. After this meeting, Charlotte Gage of Bristol Zero Tolerance and I met regularly to discuss potential ways of tackling street harassment from more of a legal standing. In March 2016, Charlotte heard that Nottingham Women’s Centre had created a new hate crime category with the Nottinghamshire police recognising ‘misogyny’ as a hate crime.

The definition of a hate crime is: “a crime motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, typically one involving violence”.

Currently, there exist the following categories for recognised hate crimes in Bristol:

  • Disability
  • Race, skin colour, ethnic origin, nationality
  • Religion or belief
  • Sexual orientation
  • Gender identity.

The definition of ‘gender identity’ as a hate crime on the Avon and Somerset Police website seems to use the terms ‘transgender’ and ‘gender’ interchangeably. Grouping these two categories causes some confusion and does not serve to clearly identify the need for a category for women to report street harassment as a gender-based hate crime. According to Nottingham Women’s Centre, transgender hate crime is recognised in law and gender-based hate isn’t. For these reasons, Nottingham decided to create a new category for ‘misogyny’ to clearly recognise and define the way that women’s experiences differ to men’s. As an, ‘other’ category already existed in the list of hate crimes which enables men to report instances of misandry, it was possible for them to create ‘misogyny’ as a new category.

Nottinghamshire Police defines misogyny hate crime as: “incidents against women that are motivated by an attitude of a man towards a woman and includes behaviour targetted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman.” (Conference brochure)

To test the impact of this initiative, a pilot programme was launched in April 2016. The Nottinghamshire Police received thorough training – funded by the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) – from hollaback, a grassroots organisation that combats street harassment, in partnership with Nottingham Women’s Centre.  Nottinghamshire Police hope that through recording incidents in this way they will be able to:

  • “Raise awareness of the seriousness of these incidents and encourage women to report”
  • Gather better intelligence to disrupt activities/perpetrators
  • Better manage risk and support women affected.

Since the pilot, women who live in Nottingham have said they feel safer walking the streets and have increased confidence in the police force. They now know they will be taken seriously and that steps are in place to prevent and protect them from such violence. Nottingham Women’s Centre have said that there have been 70 reports made under the new ‘misogyny’ category between April 2016 and January 2017. The long-term aim of Nottinghamshire Police is to “nudge people towards a culture shift and to reframe these behaviours as socially unacceptable.”

Highlights and outcomes of the conference

The ‘Safer for women’ – Tackling misogyny and street harassment conference was organised by Nottingham Women’s Centre and Nottinghamshire Police. The event was chaired by Chief Constable Sue Fish who has been pioneering this work alongside Melanie Jeffs from Nottingham Women’s Centre, both warm and admirable women with great humour, wit and impact. Police, academics, women’s groups and grassroots organisations attended to learn about the work, its benefits, and how it may be implemented in other areas throughout the UK.

Amongst the panel were key names in this field, including Laura Bates from The Everyday Sexism Project; Sam Smethers from the Fawcett Society; Zahra Butt, community activist; Dr Irene Zempi, Director of the Nottingham Centre for Bias, Prejudice and Hate Crime; and Mark Simmonds from Nottingham Trent University.

It was a powerful event with evidence and testimonies from a cross section of women living in Nottingham. Amongst these was an account from a Year 8 student who has encountered regular street harassment from older men, including being followed by men in cars on several occasions. To hear such experiences from women themselves was a compelling reminder of the reason this work is being done, and was instrumental in helping other constabularies throughout the UK to see the urgent need for action.

Amongst the inspirational sessions I attended was a Q&A for voluntary sector staff and activists. Here I forged more connections with Nottingham Women’s Centre and gained a deeper understanding of how we might implement this in Bristol.

Since the event, a small group of us have been meeting to navigate potential ways of implementing something similar here. We will be collating a body of evidence, both written and spoken testimonies, from the women of Bristol to present to Avon and Somerset Police. (Please find information below of how to get involved). We are in communication with our PCC, Sue Mountstevens, and will continue, with support from Nottingham, to pursue this change locally.

Three police forces in the UK have agreed to begin recording misogyny as a hate crime and a number of other forces are looking into it. We are hoping that Bristol will work with us to forge the way to achieving a safer community and have a significant impact on the lives of women and girls in Bristol.  Nottinghamshire Police are also trying to roll this initiative out nationally, a steady process that perhaps one day will manifest.

Sam Smethers from the Fawcett Society said at the conference; “if we can tackle the small things, maybe it will tackle the more severe”.  We must begin to recognise the links between a wolf whistle, a shouted verbal assault, a grope, a threat of rape, physical attacks, rape and murder. Smethers added, “every time a woman is wolf whistled at, it is a reminder of her position in society.”

Let us shift this now!

Take action in Bristol!

Tell us your stories:

You can support the local campaign by helping us to gather evidence of street harassment around Bristol. Tell us about your experiences or those of others to develop a picture of the problem.

See www.facebook.com/BristolStreetHarassmentProject for more information.

Map the issue:

Take part in our community safety audit of Bristol to record any incidents and create a picture of street harassment across the city. Alternatively use our online survey to add information https://goo.gl/forms/bj05R5IGdoizYbmw2

Take part in Anti-Street Harassment Week 2nd-8th April 2017:

Take part in our Call Out Card day of action on Thursday 6th April – distribute and use the cards to start a conversation and let us know what happened.

To order the cards e-mail maisy@bristolwomensvoice.org.uk

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