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10 Years of Global Organizing!

April 19, 2020 By HKearl


2011 March in Delhi, India

It’s International Anti-Street Harassment Week, and this is the tenth year that I am overseeing global action around stopping street harassment!

US action in 2011

Starting in 2007 with my master’s thesis, I began tracking street harassment activism that was happening around the world. Then I began documenting it on my new Stop Street Harassment blog in 2008 and in my first book in 2010.

In 2011, I thought, wouldn’t be wonderful if all these groups and activists around the world took action on the same day to amplify each other’s work and show this is a global problem?

With just a month notice, I organized a day of action for the First Day of Spring – since warmer weather often brings more street harassment. It was a big success and the overwhelming feedback from participating groups was to make it a full week – and in 2012, it became a week.

The week continued on, with our biggest years of action occurring in 2015 and 2016!

Now, this is our 10th year of organizing global action and it’s our most unusual – right in the middle of a global pandemic!

I appreciate so much our allies and partners who have led actions, organized, created change and educated their communities. It’s been amazing each and every year to see what people come up with, to see what impact their actions have.

You can read the reports about what happened in 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011

How will you take part this year?

2011 image by Lani Shotlow-Rincon
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Filed Under: anti-street harassment week, SH History, street harassment

2010s: The Decade Street Harassment Was Taken More Seriously

December 30, 2019 By HKearl

As the decade of the 2010s ends, I am amazed by how much progress we saw regarding street harassment, and notably, how much more seriously it was taken by governments, organizations, journalists, academics and individuals.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that street harassment is an old issue, and one that women have worked to address in various ways for decades. Their action ranged from individual efforts like warding off harassers with parasols and poking gropers with hatpins to collective action like forming self-defense and anti-harassment clubs to organizing boycotts and protests.

A big difference between these prior efforts and current ones is the Internet and our ability to document harassment with video recordings and photos, spread stories and information widely and collaborate and organize efforts in larger ways.

In the 2010s, we saw how people’s increased access to the Internet, mobile phones and social media helped propel efforts to prevent and stop street harassment. For instance, viral videos in places like Brussels, Peru and the U.S. spurred laws, studies and more social understanding of the problem. The widely shared stories of the bus gang rape and murder in Delhi and the mob attacks on women protesters at Tahrir Square in Cairo and the New Year’s Eve street attacks in Germany brought outrage, protests, and action. Many times, tweet chats and threads about street harassment spurred news stories.

Overall, the greater visibility of street harassment – and more recognition of the negative outcomes it has on people and communities – inspired individual and collective action, led to new efforts by government agencies and international NGOs, prompted more studies and books on the topic, changed how journalists write about the topic, and more.

Seven Examples of Progress and Change in the 2010s:*

  1. Anti-street harassment groups created by women who were fed up blossomed across the world, including the Observatorio Contra el Acoso Callejero (OCAC) network in Latin America, ProChange in Germany and the Stop Harcelement de la Rue in France, and a slew of groups in Egypt and India. These groups have helped pass laws, organized art and street events, held workshops, educated lawmakers and police officers, and more. Recently, Catcalls of NYC has inspired around 100 similar efforts in other parts of the world, where individuals go to the streets and use chalk to write the words street harassers uttered to them in order to take back their power and raise awareness.
  2. UN Women launched a Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces programme in 2010, shared specific guidance to all member states on addressing street harassment in 2013, and included safety in public spaces as a measure of success for the Sustainable Development Goals that were finalized in 2016.
  3. Several governments passed national or city-level laws on street harassment, including in countries like Belgium, France, Peru, Philippines, and the US. In the US, several city council hearings occurred on the topic for the first time, starting in Oct. 2010 in New York City. In the US, various transit agencies launched anti-harassment campaigns for the first time, like in Washington DC and Los Angeles, while agencies like Boston and Chicago released new efforts to their existing campaigns.
  4. Many anti-harassment and anti-violence organizations, including ones on college campuses, began doing much more to include street harassment on the continuum of gender-based violence and to at least mention it or acknowledge the connection in their other work. Just this year, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network added a page on street harassment to their website.
  5. More organizations that focus on issues affecting girls are tackling street harassment. Notably, Plan International has a large campaign now and has done lots of research on the topic. The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is another example.
  6. There were more academic studies conducted in places like the US, UK and Australia on street harassment – or on sexual harassment or sexism more broadly with street harassment as a subset – that show how and why it’s a serious issue that must be addressed. While before 2010, there was only one book solely about street harassment and only  a handful that addressed it in some way, there were several books released about it in the 2010s, including three books that I authored.
  7. The way most news media covers street harassment shifted this decade. It is much rarer for journalists and outlets to portray it as a compliment, minor annoyance or no big deal (for instance, like in this CNN article from 2008) and instead it is portrayed as a serious issue. Instead, it is recognized as something wrong, something that has a negative affect on people, and something that should change.

SSH and the 2010s:

The 2010s were big for Stop Street Harassment, too, especially considering we do not have any full-time or paid staff. For instance, this decade, we launched International Anti-Street Harassment Week (2011), oversaw the first nationally representative study on street harassment in the US (2014) and launched the world’s first street harassment hotline (2016). We oversaw several years of Blog Correspondent cohorts, funded more than dozen Safe Public Spaces Mentoring teams, and had close to 2 million visitors to our website (we changed web platforms in May 2011 and our analytics show 1.74 million visitors since then).

Personally, in the 2010s, I authored around 80 op-eds on street harassment alone, gave over 150 talks, and responded to over 350 media interviews – all of which helped raise the visibility of the issue. I also did consulting for entities like UN Women and US Dept of State on the topic and gave pro bono advice to places like Runner’s World, Google and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

What Will the 2020s Bring?

Looking ahead to the 2020s, I’m not sure what to expect. The biggest burst of changes and actions around street harassment globally (e.g. in UN policies) and  in the U.S. occurred between 2010-2016. Once street harassment becomes part of policies, there isn’t as much work to do – the goal was met, to some extent.

Additionally, I think things like Donald Trump being elected president in the U.S., anti-migrant policies globally, and growing awareness of climate change/climate crisis has taken some focus away from street harassment. I also think the #MeToo movement has taken a lot of attention away from street harassment and placed it more fully on workplace sexual harassment. This is despite our two recent studies showing that street harassment is the form of harassment most frequently experienced by persons of all genders and the one that people are most likely to experience first. Thus, with these patterns already established, I’m not sure what changes we’ll see regarding street harassment in the coming decade.

But, I do think we’ll see some changes. For instance, each year for International Anti-Street Harassment Week, when I think, oh, this issue isn’t as interesting to people anymore, groups in upwards of 30 countries still take part. New groups and efforts continue to emerge. Newer social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are places where a lot of the awareness-raising occurs. So, perhaps in the 2020s, we will see activism in new countries that haven’t had it before – and we will see people share stories who haven’t shared them before, likely on whatever new platform comes out!

Also, I think what reflecting on history tells us is, there will be ebbs and flows in widespread focus on issues. The Internet will help us continue to share our stories and keep attention on street harassment to varying degrees, even when we’re in an ebbing period of overall less attention on the issue.

Personally, what I’d love to see happen in the 2020s is schools tackle the issue through sex education / life skills courses, and organizations that work with boys and young men to talk about the topic with them head-on. We need to break the cycle of harassment and end the socialization that tells boys it’s okay and the right way to treat others. I’d also love to see more PSAs about street harassment go up in communities encouraging people to stand up and speak out when they see harassment occurring, and to see more entities undertake anti-street harassment efforts that don’t involve criminalization (like efforts the DC Government and Runner’s World/Women’s Health recently launched, as examples).

What do you see as the 2010s highlights for stopping street harassment and what are your wishes and hopes for 2020?

 

*Note: You can read more about many of these events and efforts — and more — in my 2015 book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World.

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Filed Under: News stories, Resources, SH History, SSH programs, street harassment, year end Tagged With: 2010s, decade, wrap-up

SSH’s 10 Year Anniversary (Part 2)

May 29, 2018 By HKearl

Since it was founded 10 years ago, SSH has had a big impact locally in the Washington, DC-area, nationally in the U.S. and internationally! We are proud to have helped create a societal shift where street harassment is taken seriously by many, and there are global entities like the United Nations, national and city-level legislatures, researchers, academics, journalists, NGO advocacy groups, civil society organizations and community groups that address it.

One way to measure SSH’s impact is to look at the number of news articles citing SSH’s research and work – and that number is more than 350. This includes articles at BBC, Guardian, USA Today, the Today Show, CNN, Wall Street Journal, PBS News Hour, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Marie Clare Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Shape Magazine, Health Magazine, Runner’s World Magazine, Ms. Magazine and New Moon Girls Magazine.

SSH’s 11 Biggest Achievements

In reflecting over the past 10 years, I decided to make a list of what I see as our biggest achievements. I aimed for 10 and came up with 11 that had to be on the list! 😊 Thank you so much to everyone who helped make them possible!

1. Running one of the go-to websites in the world for information about street harassment. It has been visited by at least 1.5 million people (the figure since we started tracking it seven years ago… this includes more than one million people in the past four years). Thousands of people from around the world have shared their street harassment stories on the website to bring attention to the problem, and there have been 13 cohorts of Blog Correspondents who wrote about street harassment issues and activism in their communities around the globe.

2. Commissioning and publishing in 2014 the first large-scale, nationally representative survey on street harassment that includes respondents of all genders. Our national study not only includes the findings from the 2,000-person survey but also the summaries of focus groups with various under-represented voices and ideas for how to stop street harassment based on interviews with various academic and community-based experts. The study has been used by countless entities and cited by every major U.S. news outlet.

3. Commissioning and publishing in 2018 another nationally representative survey on all forms of sexual harassment and assault across all locations. The purpose was to bring forward the data behind the #MeToo stories and show that public spaces is where people experience sexual harassment the most. The New York Times requested the right to do an exclusive story on the findings the day it was released, and many other outlets covered it after that. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UN Women have requested presentations on the findings in the coming months.

4. Starting International Anti-Street Harassment Week to provide space for groups and people all over the world to speak out against street harassment in their communities at the same time, and then overseeing eight of these weeks. Groups in up to 40 countries routinely participate, engaging tens of thousands of people in total each year.

5. Collaborating with Collective Action for Safe Spaces and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on a widescale and comprehensive anti-sexual harassment transit campaign since 2011. It’s entailed: training frontline staff, three waves of print PSAs and one wave of audio PSAs, two representative surveys of riders, and annual outreach/flyering days at various Metro stations. Millions of riders have been exposed to the campaign.

6. Founding the first-ever National Street Harassment Hotline in 2016, which is run in collaboration with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network and offers 24/7 free support by phone or secure IM chat, in English and Spanish. It serves an average of 30 people per month.

Anti-street harassment activists from Brazil, India, Italy and USA at HABITAT III in Ecuador

 

7. Speaking at and participating in 150+ important conferences, rallies, and events, including:

  • UN convenings on sexual violence in India (x2), Turkey, Ecuador and Mexico as well as multiple UN Commission on the Status of Women events in New York City;
  • An International Women’s Day March with UN Women in New York City;
  • Several Slutwalk rallies in Washington, DC;
  • National Sexual Assault Conference, National Women’s Studies Association Conference, International Coalition Against Street Harassment Conference, and NOW’s annual conference.
  • City Council Hearings on street harassment in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
  • Workshops and lectures at more than 40 university/college campuses, including NYU, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Irvine, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska, University of Nebraska, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Portland State University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, George Mason University, Santa Clara University and more.
US Department of State trip to Ethiopia

8. Advising entities like Google, Lyft, Runner’s World, U.S. Department of State, New York City Council and lawmakers in the U.S. and internationally on their efforts to address street harassment and related issues. Notably, New Jersey passed a law against upskirt photos thanks to initial consultation with SSH early in the legislative process.

9. Producing four publications that are regularly read, cited and have had an impact, including:

  • Two academic books: Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women (available in paperback for $13.50), and Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World (available in hardcover for $37 and $35 for ebook).
  • A collection of empowering responses to harassment in 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers. (Available in paperback for $10, Kindle for $6.99).
  • A state-by-state legal guide called Know Your Rights: Street Harassment and the Law (Download the free toolkit (PDF) or access the companion web feature).

 

10. Mentoring 14 groups around the world on their anti-street harassment projects through the Safe Public Spaces Mentoring Program. It started as a PILOT in 2013 when we worked with the leaders of projects in Afghanistan, Cameroon and Chicago, USA. In 2014, we worked with six teams in India, Kenya, Nepal, Nicaragua, Serbia, and the USA. In 2015, we worked with four teams in France, India, Romania, and the USA.

11. Leading or collaborating on campaigns against companies that trivialize street harassment. The campaigns entail pressuring companies to drop harmful ads and change offensive language. One example is a campaign against a construction company in New Jersey that had a billboard suggesting street harassment is a compliment – a petition led to the company to immediately remove it.

What will our next 10 years bring?

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Filed Under: History, nonprofit, SH History, SSH programs, street harassment Tagged With: 10 year anniversary, 10 years, achievements

SSH’s 10 Year Anniversary (Part 1)

May 29, 2018 By HKearl

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of Stop Street Harassment! I am so grateful to the thousands of people who have shared their stories on the blog; participated in International Anti-Street Harassment Week; served as Blog Correspondents, social media volunteers, interns and board members; donated to fund our programs; attended SSH talks; read our articles and publications; signed our petitions; and more. With the help of our community, we have achieved a lot in 10 years, particularly considering we are a small organization run by volunteers who all have other jobs.

To commemorate this big 10-year milestone, here is a history of how we came to be, followed by a list of 11 of our biggest achievements!

History of Stop Street Harassment

During the fall of 2006 and spring/summer of 2007, I researched and wrote my master’s thesis on gender-based street harassment while attending George Washington University in Washington, DC. I focused on how, in lieu of social recognition of the problem, women were using websites like the Street Harassment Project and Hollaback! chapter sites to share personal stories and strategies for dealing with street harassment. I conducted a small survey as part of my research. After I turned in my thesis, I put the survey results online – and reporters started finding it. At the time, there was so little accessible research on this topic that my thesis research was newsworthy.

The most influential article that cited my thesis was one on CNN.com in May 2008. At that time, it was commonplace for people to view street harassment as a compliment, a minor annoyance, no big deal or the fault of the person being harassed. The title of the CNN article reflects this reality: “Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?” Really, though, the title should have read something like, “Catcalling: A form of street harassment that must end.”

The article inspired dozens of blog posts and articles, hundreds of comments to the CNN article and many emails that I personally received that showed: 1) how common street harassment is and 2) how many misconceptions there are about the problem.

I was working full-time and I had no intention of becoming an anti-street harassment activist, but the response to the article demonstrated a clear need for public education on the topic. This need became more urgent once I went back to the websites I had analyzed for my thesis and found that the two websites I liked the best were either gone or inactive. Plus, at the time, unless you lived in one of the few cities with Hollaback! chapter sites, you didn’t have a place to publicly share your street harassment story. My domestic partner suggested I start my own website where I could share the resources I had collected through my thesis research. I also could provide space for story-sharing from people located anywhere in the world. I decided to do it.

In May 2008, Stop Street Harassment was born.

SSH began as a website that listed resources about street harassment and there was a companion blog where people could share their stories (I combined the website and blog during a 2011 website redesign). After a few months, I also began to write blog posts tracking relevant news and initiatives globally. I regularly searched online for new initiatives and conducted interviews with the people running them (after a few years, there were so many of these efforts that I could no longer keep up with them!).

In the years since, SSH’s work has expanded to include various public education components, community mobilization programs and direct services. Our projects usually have come about because I’ve seen a gap that needs to be filled and decide to fill it, be that by commissioning a nationally representative survey to collect data PROVING street harassment is a problem, founding a national hotline to provide emotional support for people facing street harassment, or organizing space for groups all over the world to join forces on an annual basis to speak out against street harassment together. SSH also does a lot of idea-sharing of what’s working in various parts of the world and makes introductions between activists when relevant.

One of my big goals in the early years of SSH was to document the problem, which we’ve done. Another was to help change the societal acceptance of street harassment as being inevitable, a compliment or the fault of the harassed person (e.g. see the CNN article title!). We’ve made a lot of progress there, too. While there are some people who still spew views that minimize and dismiss the harms of street harassment, there are fewer of them. Further, it is much less common for journalists, government officials and others who have a public voice to frame it this way. For instance, in 2011, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority publicly said regarding sexual harassment on the transit system: “One person’s harassment is another person’s flirting.” Now they are one of the transit systems doing the most in the world to address and prevent sexual harassment.

There is still a lot of work left to do, but I feel pleased with what has changed in 10 years.

Thank you to everyone who has supported SSH and has helped create a societal shift where street harassment is taken more seriously and addressed. Hopefully one day harassing strangers in public spaces will be completely socially unacceptable and then people of all genders and backgrounds can safely enjoy and utilize public spaces.

While much of our work is done pro bono, we are grateful to our donors who have made initiatives like our national studies and the hotline possible. You too can make a tax-deductible donation to keep our work going.

Read about 11 of our biggest achievements since May 2008!

 

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Filed Under: History, SH History, SSH programs, street harassment Tagged With: 10 year anniversary, 10 years

USA: Breaking the News about Street Harassment

February 26, 2018 By Correspondent

Elizabeth Kuster, Brooklyn, NY, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Like most women, I’m out and about in public a lot — going to work, running errands, meeting friends downtown. And like most women, I get attention from men — young and old; white, black, Hispanic; well dressed and not — as I go about my daily routine. I’ve been whistled at and pinched. I’ve received thousands of “Hey, sexy”s and “Wanna f*ck?”s. I’ve been stared at. I’ve been followed. I’ve had my hair, breasts and behind stroked.

It has happened to me so often that I started to get used to it, told myself it was normal.

             “It’s just the city,” I said.

             “It’s what I was wearing,” I said.

             It’s no big deal,” I said.

I was wrong. It’s street harassment, and I’m not alone. It happens to millions of women every day. And it’s time we do something about it.

So began “Don’t ‘Hey, Baby’ Me: How To Fight Street Harassment,” the first-ever mainstream-media article on the subject, which I pitched and wrote for Glamour magazine in 1992. Since no studies about street harassment had been conducted at that time, I had to break up the subject into its various components and tackle each one individually. I covered aspects such as improper touch. Sexual profanities. Objectifying language. Physically intimidating behaviors such as staring and stalking. And I delved into how each of those male behaviors changed the way women behaved when they went out in public.

To get a chorus of women’s voices, I sent a shout-out to Glamour staffers and contacted friends, family and stringers in other states. I had 10 of them keep street-harassment diaries for seven days, listing every single comment, look or gesture they received. To debunk the myth that what you wear invites harassment, I and several other women from Glamour were photographed on the street in our regular clothes, after which each of us set off alone for a different New York City neighborhood, where we, too, detailed the incidents of street harassment we received.

I called the NYPD press office, told them what I was working on, and was forwarded to a male police officer — who proved to be so patronizing that I didn’t even quote him in my article. Incredulous at being interviewed by someone from Glamour in the first place, he literally laughed at my questions and said — and this I did quote in the piece — “Street comments are not a serious problem.”

I interviewed Naomi Wolf, feminist author of The Beauty Myth. “Our taxes go for the upkeep of parks and streets, but women do not own full use of them because of street harassment,” she said.

I interviewed Callie Khouri, the screenwriter who’d taken the world by storm with her Oscar-winning script for the feminist blockbuster Thelma & Louise. “A woman who enjoys being yelled at on the street is a woman who has been socialized to think that she is valued and defined by her sexuality,” she said.

I interviewed Carol Brooks Gardner, a professor of sociology and women’s studies and author of the book Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment. “I’ve talked to [many] women who complained to police officers who were right there and saw what happened, yet they didn’t do anything,” she said.

I interviewed D.C. police officer Patricia Harman, author of the newly published book The Danger Zone: How You Can Protect Yourself from Rape, Robbery and Assault. “[Harassers] have watched their fathers do it, their brothers do it. The only way we’re going to get a handle on it is if we start with the next generation,” she said.

And I interviewed Cheris Kramarae, a professor of speech communication and sociology. “Organized anger will eventually make a difference,” she said.

You can read my article in its entirety via my online portfolio. I’m still proud of it. At the time, it received critical acclaim — and a respectable landslide of reader mail, mostly from women who had their own street-harassment stories to tell. They were grateful, at long last, to finally have a name for the discrete and difficult-to-describe form of sexual abuse they’d been enduring out in public all their lives.

Feminist Apparel and Pussy Division sign in NYC, 2015

Oh, how I wish social media had existed at the time! Had I been able to start a #StopStreetHarassment initiative back then, we might not still be dealing with the issue today.

Elizabeth pitched and wrote the very first mainstream-media article about street harassment. She has held full-time editorial positions at publications such as Glamour, Seventeen and The Huffington Post and is author of the self-help/humor book Exorcising Your Ex. You can follow Elizabeth on Twitter at @bethmonster.

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Filed Under: correspondents, SH History, Stories, street harassment

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