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Welcome, First Blog Cohort of 2016!

January 11, 2016 By HKearl

Since 2013, cohorts of people from around the world write monthly articles about street harassment and activism efforts in their communities in four month cohorts.

We’re excited to welcome our newest cohort (and welcome back LB Klein and the ProChange team who have been excellent correspondents before!!) and look forward to reading their articles!

Meet the Correspondents of the First Cohort of 2016

LB Klein, MSW, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

LB has dedicated her academic and professional career to ending gender-based violence, supporting survivors, and advancing social justice. She is currently an independent consultant based in Atlanta, GA. LB serves as a lead trainer for Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, through which she trains colleges, universities, and community organizations to implement Bringing in the Bystander®. She is also a graduate student in the Program on Gender-Based Violence within the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. Her research currently focuses on campus sexual assault and intimate partner violence prevention programs, trauma-informed organizational cultures, and compassion satisfaction. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in social work from Washington University in St. Louis and a graduate certificate in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender health from Drexel University. LB previously lead Emory University’s Respect Program and the St. Louis County Domestic Violence Court volunteer program. She is a board member for Jane Doe Advocacy Center and the Association of Title IX Administrators. She serves on the founding leadership council of the Campus Advocates & Prevention Professionals Association (CAPPA). You can follow her on twitter @LB_Klein or on her website at http://www.lbklein.net.

Rupande Mehta, New Jersey, USA

Rupande is a writer passionate about women’s rights in India and the world. Having experienced physical and sexual violence from a very young age has made Rupande a fervent advocate of violence against women. Rupande grew up in Mumbai, India where she was consistently subject to street harassment and various cultural norms that force women to live as second class citizens. All these experiences made Rupande’s resolve stronger to campaign for equal rights for women and girls. Rupande has an MBA and is currently working towards her MPA, looking to specialize in Non Profit Management. Rupande writes for the Huffington Post and various other websites. You can find her writing on her blog at Rupande-mehta.tumblr.com or follow her on Twitter @rupandemehta. In her spare time, Rupande loves to spend time with her family, cook healthy foods and read.

Kathleen Moyer, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Kathleen is a full-time graduate student studying professional and business communication. After earning her master’s degree, she hopes to pursue a career in which she’ll be able to dedicate her life to her greatest passion: social justice. As a proud feminist, Kathleen feels strongly about striving for equality in all areas of society. She is currently involved in planning initiatives to increase awareness of sexual assault, domestic violence, and other related issues through her university’s anti-sexual violence group, Explorers Against Sexual Violence. In addition to this work, she has also assisted with volunteer recruitment for Philadelphia’s 2015 March to End Rape Culture, and plans to be involved in organizing the United Nations Association of Greater Philadelphia’s 2016 International Women’s Day event. Some of her feminist role models include Alice Paul, Gloria Steinem, and Malala Yousafzai. Outside of her activism, Kathleen enjoys reading mystery novels, watching the Philadelphia Eagles, listening to U2, and anything involving dogs.

Kayla Parker, Washington, D.C., USA

Kayla is a sophomore acting major at Howard University and is a native of Birmingham, Alabama. She is passionate about theatre arts and film and strives to use her craft to create positive societal change. In addition to focusing on school, she spends her time working on her web-series, “Black Girls R Us” that aims to uplift black women of all different shapes, sizes, and shades. For updates on episode releases, you can follow her on twitter at @TheTimidLioness.

Julia Tofan, Connecticut, USA

Julia is a student in a rural town in Connecticut. She’s passionate about gender equality and feminism and she aspires to be an activist for marginalized populations. She first became interested in human rights when recognizing the great inequality in the world. She realized that education was a powerful way to combat inequality, so she joined Givology, a nonprofit dedicated to improving access to education, as a blogger. She now also writes for Dreams That Could Be, an organization telling the stories of students facing great challenges but persevering in their education, and is excited about being a Street Harassment Correspondent. She believes raising awareness about issues and educating others is the most powerful way to make a difference, and that’s what she seeks to do. Read her blog posts on Givology and Dreams That Could Be and follow her on Twitter @Julia_Tofan!

ProChange, Germany

ProChange is a group of people between 20 and 64 years of age who are active. ProChange consists of a small group of core members in a network of other activists. Their main focus is on street harassment, sexism and sexualized violence. They are opposed to all forms of exploitation which are all inter-connected.

2015: 20 of Our Achievements

December 30, 2015 By HKearl

THANK YOU to everyone who made our work possible this year! Here are 20 highlights from this year.

You can read more and see photos to go along with each one via our Annual Report.

Programs:

Organized the largest International Anti-Street Harassment Week to date from April 12-18! Groups in 41 countries participated through marches, rallies, workshops, sidewalk chalking, putting up street signs, launching anti-harassment campaigns, flyering, tweet chats, and more. Thanks to our campaign manager Britnae Purdy for her work.
Worked with three cohorts of blog correspondents (more than 35 people from around the world) across the year who wrote articles about street harassment and activism to stop it in their communities.
Funded four Safe Public Spaces Mentoring teams in France, India, Romania, and USA. This fall and winter they’ve held art exhibits, high school workshops, sidewalk chalking, and street demonstrations. Our 2014 teams from Nicaragua and Kenya also completed their projects this past spring.
Published around 150 contributor street harassment stories on our blog.
As part of our “Campaigns Against Companies,” we teamed up with Care2 and CASS to create a petition asking the American restaurant chain TGI Friday’s to pull a disgusting ad that trivializes street harassment. More than 25,000 people signed it.
Redesigned our website, thanks to donations and the work of web designer Sarah Marie Lacy.

Advised, Gave Input, and Cited By:

Advised Lyft on anti-harassment issues for their drivers, in collaboration with Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS).
Worked with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and CASS on the 2^nd wave of anti-harassment ads on the Metro system, did an outreach day at five metro stops, presented on the campaign to WMATA staff, and crafted a survey instrument that will be used to survey riders about sexual harassment in 2016. The findings will help inform our 3^rd wave of ads.
Met with and advised the DC police gay and lesbian liaison unit division chief and Las Vegas Rape Crisis Center staff.
Entities including the following used or cited our work: the DC City Council, DC Mayor’s office, Jeremy Corbyn (a Labour leadership candidate in the UK), Fiona Patten (a member of Parliament in Victoria, Australia), NYU, and Safe Routes to School National Partnership.
Received more than 85 media mentions, including coverage in the Washington Post, Guardian, Real Simple magazine, Cosmo magazine, Voice of America, The Economist, WNYC public radio, Latina.com, and the Irish Times.

Events, Rallies, Conferences and Marches:

Board members spoke at 19 events, including campus and community talks in AZ, DC, IA, MD, MN, NE, NY, PA, and VA. Also including my international talks: a campus presentation in Canada and two UN conference presentations, one in India in June and a second in Turkey in December.
Two board members testified at the first-ever DC city council hearing on street harassment.
Board members took action as part of the protests and rallies around racism and over-policing of Black bodies in the U.S. For example, Maureen Evans Arthurs lives near Baltimore and helped distribute food and toiletries to residents in need and also participated in #BlackLivesMatter rallies in the city; Maliyka Muhammad joined the “NYC Rise Up & Shut It Down With Baltimore” rally; and I attended a “Vigil for Rekia Boyd, Black Women, Trans Women, and Girls” in Washington, DC.
Joined the UN’s march on International Women’s Day in New York City. We marched with the Brazil anti-street harassment group Chega de Fiu Fiu and the American group Voices of Men to send the clear message that street harassment is an issue we must address globally if we want to see equality for women!
Rallied with SlutWalk DC in front of the Chinese Embassy in protest of the jailing of Chinese feminist activists simply for distributing information about sexual harassment at transit stops (they were later released).
Tabled at Awesome Con (a comics convention in Washington, DC) with Feminist Public Works/Geeks for Consent and CASS, and presented at the National Conference for College Women Student Leaders in Maryland with CASS.
Facilitated a focus group with Asian-American women in Boston, MA, and added the summary to the 2014 national street harassment report.
For the release of my third book, Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World, dozens of activists featured in it participated in a Global Tweetchat, and various activists from the book joined me in speaking at two of my book release events in Washington, DC and New York City.

Financials:

Received funding from Lyft ($3,000) and the Peiffer Foundation ($1,500). SSH also received $6,255.89 in donations from individuals. SSH’s work is largely done on a volunteer-basis. This year, $2,000 was used for part-time help for work relating to International Anti-Street Harassment Week. Approximately $3,500 more was spent on programs, the website redesign, and fees.

Romania: High School Girls and Boys for a City without Street Harassment!

December 30, 2015 By Contributor

This post is from our Safe Public Spaces Team in Bucharest, Romania. The SPSM projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!

Ta-naaa! We’ve completed the Mentoring Program and we are happy because it was a great experience for us, as activist and working in the NGO sector and for the high school students as well! Thanks to Stop Street Harassment Mentoring Program we had this amazing chance to meet teenagers girls and boys and to speak with them delicate subjects like violence and street harassment.

During the time between August and December 2015 FILIA Centre, a feminist NGO from Bucharest, Romania, implemented the project “High school girls and boys for a city without street harassment!” financed by Stop Street Harassment NGO.

We are Simona-Maria Chirciu, Stefania Vintila and Loredana Valcianu, members of the FILIA Centre and we gladly complete the Program Mentoring with great success and smiles. We’ve organized three workshops for 60 high school teenagers from the Technic College of Aeronautics “Henri Coanda” in Bucharest. We talked with the participants about discrimination, equal opportunities, violence against women, and street harassment and the activism against it all around the world. The principal from the high school and the female teacher who runs the department of Program and Projects of this institution and also some of the teachers were very open regarding the subject we wanted to address and regarding our project. We had their full support in implementing it and we are very grateful for this.

We encouraged the participants to get involved in the discussion by giving examples of discrimination, violence and harassment from their own experience or from the experience of their friends. They were interested by the subject mostly because we were talking about experiences that happened to them or to their loved ones too, experiences about nobody talks about. In Romania street harassment represents a taboo: nobody talks about it, many men deny it and some women barely if they have courage to complain about it to anyone who is not their friends.

At the end of the workshops we organized a contest: the high school boys and girls could use any material to depict street harassment as a form of violence. We encouraged them to show a solution that in their opinion is suitable for the Romanian context in order to prevent or to end street harassment against women. The teenagers were very interested and did their best for this contest. They created videos, drawings, essays, and powerpoint presentations and a poster as well. Their perspectives were so interesting and the way they see equal access to the public space for men and women helps us to incorporate their experiences in everything that we organize on this subject in the future.

In the implementation of this project we had the support of our former volunteer Aila Veli and our colleague Mihaela Sasarman from Transcena Association, an NGO in Romania, who has many years of experience working on the issue of violence against women and specifically working with perpetrators.

The girls and boys who participated offered us a very, very positive feedback about our interaction with them, about the way we presented the subject and about the way we involved them in the process of defining the role each of us has to create a society free of harassment in public spaces. They asked us to return to their high school soon with workshops to talk about rape, teenager relations and other subjects from the same domain.

We are grateful for all the support from Holly and Stop Street Harassment! We, as a team evolved and learned so much. Indeed, working with teens on street harassment issue is challenging but so rewarding! We recommend this kind of experience to other activists on street harassment worldwide!

Simona-Maria Chirciu, Stefania Vintila and Loredana Valcianu are members of the FILIA Centre.

France: Comic Exhibit is Spreading Far!

December 29, 2015 By Contributor

This post is from our Safe Public Spaces Team in Lyon, France. The SPSM projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!

The Stop Street Harassment mentoring program comes to an end with the holiday and we must confess, it’s so good to rest! Especially so when having accomplished everything you had in mind and more, and looking forward to even bigger developments!

From a material point of view, we’ve manage to print three copies of our exhibition, all on thick laminated paper. Two in size A4 and one in size A3. This allowed us to use it in different places at the same time and, since the posters are very light, to send it via regular post without any difficulty. Also, the city council of Grenoble, who displayed it on huge panels, was so thrilled about the outcomes of the project that our contact asked us permission to re-print the version we came up to together on roll-ups and already booked six one-week-long exhibitions in different places of the city for 2016.

We’ve received several other requests for renting our exhibition, coming from city councils, universities, high schools or non-profit organizations. The variety of organizations wishing to use it is proof to us that street harassment is an issue that a lot of people feel concerned about, as everyone should, that people are ready to speak up whenever offered an opportunity to do so and that public representatives are willing to broach the subject with us. The latter has been proved recently by the French government launching a campaign on his own against sexist harassment in public transportation. We feel very proud to have achieved such a recognition of the problem.

Since our mid-way blog post in October, we have had time to compile the many feedback we’ve got from places we showed our exhibition and from its visitors as well. And it has been very positive ! People reported that this was a really fun way to approach such a subject and, whatever the age or profile of the visitor, having learned or discovered at least one thing they’d never thought about. Here lies the real achievement for us, and it was great to collect all kinds of comments.

Last but not least, our project is far from done, and it fills us with joy and great expectations ! Stop Harcèlement de Rue is composed by several groups in different cities, and some of them feel comfortable to use the exhibition for their school workshops and presentations. So it will be sent to Paris and another city yet to be chosen. But the big news is we made a new partner, the team organizing the Lyon BD Festival, a comics festival taking place in June. Together, we’ll launch a fundraising campaign at the beginning of February to be able to pay new artists for added posters and design to the exhibition. We’re already in touch with half a dozen of illustrators and comics authors who are willing to participate. The augmented exhibition will be printed on big roll-ups and presented during the week of the festival in a well frequented place in the city center. We will then use this new version for our own events and workshops.

So this has been four exciting months for us, we feel that we’ve been able to start making a difference on the street harassment matter and that strong enriching partnerships have emerged and will allow us to continue.

We wish to thank Holly and Stop Street Harassment again for their support and kindness, and hope we’ll be able to meet in the flesh someday!

Anne Favier co-directs Stop Harcèlement de Rue – Lyon.

USA: Florida Chalking Awareness Day

December 28, 2015 By Contributor

This post is from our Safe Public Spaces Team in Florida, USA. The SPSM projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!

By Tena Gordon

In addition to our library event in October educating teens about street harassment, on December 6, 2015, Me=You: Sexual Violence Awareness (MYSVA for short) held our first Chalk Day! We set up on the sidewalk along Degroodt Road, outside our local library. Jineth (the member of MYSVA pictured to the left) held a sign to attract the drivers in passing vehicles to participate. Unfortunately, this was not a successful strategy. Next time, we are going to host Chalk Day at a place with less vehicle traffic and more foot traffic.

Anyway, people on foot and bike stopped and wrote messages against street harassment or just signed their name. We offered them a free informational, promotional package and free water. The most touching part of the day was when Rachael (the jogger pictured to the right) came back and brought her daughter of high-school age to sign her name, too.

Also, to our surprise, Sergio (the student journalist pictured below) from our school came and participated. He took pictures of us chalking, and he did a story on our event that aired on the school news.

In total, about 10-15 people participated. They were mostly of middle-age, not our targeted demographic, so next time we will have it in a place where teens hang out more frequently. Overall, Chalk Day raised awareness about street harassment, our main goal.

Tena Gordon is the MYSVA Coordinator and a high school student in Florida.

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