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Update on Washington, DC-Area Anti-Harassment Transit Campaign

November 23, 2015 By HKearl

It’s been more than 3.5 years since we began working with Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) on an anti-harassment campaign.

Periodically, we meet with the sexual harassment taskforce at WMATA to discuss the campaign and next steps, etc. Today was one of those meetings, with myself, four WMATA staff members, and CASS’s interim executive director Jessica Raven.

For a status update on what the campaign currently entails:

* A second wave of anti-harassment ads are up across the system.

* More trainings are underway to ensure that all 4000 front line employees know what to do if they witness or experience street harassment or if someone reports an incident to them.

* There is an online reporting form that makes it easier to report incidents.

* We jointly hold annual outreach days, distributing materials at metro stations during International Anti-Street Harassment Week. This year, we were at five metro stations across VA, DC and MD.

I am excited that today at our meeting, WMATA committed to a third wave of ads next year. They will survey riders before the end of this year to better understand their experiences with harassment and their feelings about the first and second waves of ads, and ask for their thoughts for the next wave. We discussed having a message focused on bystanders and/or the community-of riders generally, but we will see what riders have to say.

11.23.15 WMATA - SSH - CASS meeting. (L to R): Jason Minser, Jessica Raven, Lynn Bowser, Holly Kearl, Deputy Chief Leslie Campbell, and Morgan Dye — *11.23.15 WMATA – SSH – CASS meeting. (L to R): Jason Minser, Jessica Raven, Lynn Bowser, Holly Kearl, Deputy Chief Leslie Campbell, and Morgan Dye*

WMATA wants to collaborate on four flyering/outreach events at Metro stations in 2016: 1) during Anti-Street Harassment Week in April, 2) mid-summer, 3) around the back-to-school time, and 4) on December 10 for Human Rights Day.

We discussed a few other ways that we may collaborate to help spread the word about the campaign among WMATA staff and the larger Metro-area community. More on those ideas when they are solidified.

All in all, it was a productive meeting.

I am so proud and happy every time I see one of the Metro ads (and on my metro ride to/from the meeting I saw two different ones), not only because I am part of the campaign, but also because I feel great pride in knowing that my city takes this issue seriously and is expending significant time, resources, and staff power to help people feel safer on public transit. Thank you, WMATA!

Also of note –

* The history of how our collaboration came about is featured in my new book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World.

* If you’re in the DC-area, join WMATA, CASS, Defend Yourself, the DC Rape Crisis Center, and SSH staff and many community members in testifying about street harassment before the DC City Council next week, Dec. 3.

Boston and NYC Street Harassment Events

November 8, 2015 By HKearl

On Nov. 4, I had the honor of facilitating a focus group on street harassment with Asian-American women in Boston. I will add a summary of the session to our 2014 national study on street harassment by the end of the month. A common theme among the participants was how often the harassment was racialized as well as sexualized and how often they were treated like geishas or fetishes. Many recall the harassment beginning when they were 9, 10, 11 years old. Also, it was almost never Asian-American men who harassed them, rather men of other races, especially white and black men.

Asian-American focus group in Boston

Many thanks to Sarah Chang for suggesting it and hosting it and thank you to her and the eight other women who bravely shared their stories.

Then on Nov. 5, Bluestockings bookstore in New York City hosted a book event for my new book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism around the World. I was joined by seven co-presenters. Bisi Alimi is from Nigeria and lives in London; Gaya Branderhorst of Straatintimidatie is from the Netherlands and lives in New York; Alicia Wallace of Hollaback! Bahamas is from the Bahamas and just moved to New York; Ileana Jiménez is a high school teacher in New York City who talks about street harassment with her students; she brought two of her students who shared their stories, Shana and StellaRose; and Brittany Brathwaite is a community organizer for Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) in New York City.

Bluestockings bookstore, NYC

We discussed what street harassment looks like in our communities, various activism actions underway to address it, and why it is so important to talk to youth about it (because they may already be experiencing it and perpetrating it and because street harassment is learned behavior that can be unlearned — or ideally, never learned). There was a rich Q&A with the audience. Two women documentarians filmed the event and will be sharing the footage with me soon. I’ll post it when I have it.

GGE, Ileana’s and Alicia’s work are all featured in my book.

High school class, NYC

Lastly, on Nov. 6, I spoke with Ileana’s high school students at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City. Many of them are already routinely experiencing street harassment as well as sexual harassment in schools. Many thanks to Ileana for bringing this issue into the classroom and for caring so much about his students.

USA: Teens Educating Teens

October 29, 2015 By Contributor

Our four Safe Public Spaces Mentees are half-way through their projects. This week we are featuring their blog posts about how the projects are going so far. This post is from our team in the USA. Their projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!

Hey, I’m Tena, the founder of Me=You: Sexual Violence Awareness (MYSVA for short). My friends Jineth and Ash and I make-up MYSVA. We are a teen activism group that aims to get fellow teenagers talking about and preventing gender- and sexual orientation-based violence.

For the past few months, we have been working on the administration and promotion of MYSVA (setting up social media accounts, partaking in the SPSM program, setting up a bank account, and more). Just this month, I finally secured approval from the Palm Bay (Florida) City Manager to host MYSVA Chalk Day on Sunday, December 6; a day we, our friends, and passersby will write testimonies and anti-street harassment messages in chalk along the sidewalk outside the local library, Degroodt.

A few weeks ago, on October 13, MYSVA presented about violence issues to an audience of 15 teenagers at the Degroodt Library Teen Advisory Group Meeting.

First, via power point slides, we covered different types of sexual violence (street harassment, teen dating violence, domestic violence, etc.) and how to recognized them. Then, we role-played street harassment scenarios, with me as the bystander, Ash as the street harassment sufferer, and Danny (a person from the audience) playing the harasser. The bystander just watched and made excuses for the harasser, like “maybe he is just being nice” or “maybe he knows her”, as the victim was followed and catcalled.

The audience laughed when Danny’s character exclaimed, “Are you a beaver, ‘cuz DAMN!” but we made sure to emphasize how uncomfortable this is for a stranger to hear this from a random being off the street. We brainstormed different ways a bystander can intervene.

Also, we collected surveys on the teen audience’s experiences of harassment (to be analyzed in the near future). All in all, our audience was really receptive and we got positive feedback from them.

Plus, on October 6, I interviewed Ms. Sue Kiley, a licensed counselor and the director of program’s at the Brevard Women’s Center in Melbourne, Florida. I learned lots of new informatiom on the motivations behind harassment, especially stalking, and support available for those who have experienced it. I hope to share my new-found knowledge when we launch our website (coming soon!)

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

France: Comic Strips are Changing the Conversation

October 25, 2015 By Contributor

Our four Safe Public Spaces Mentees are half-way through their projects. This week we are featuring their blog posts about how the projects are going so far. This post is from our team in France. Their projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2016 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!

At the "Livestation DIY" bar in Lyon — *At the “Livestation DIY” bar in Lyon*

Street harassment wasn’t a word we used to hear in France a few years ago. To draw a really rough sketch, women often talked about “oafishes” between themselves, mostly making it funny stories. Men never got to sense the extent of the issue.

Then Sofie Peeters shot a shocking film in the streets of Brussels, “Femmes de la Rue” (“Women of the Street”, 2012), showing how she was constantly, repeatedly and heavily harassed in the street, whether it was stares, whistles, names or insults. The media started to talk about it, and it’s like women realized they weren’t alone and had the right to speak up.

It had to be extreme to make us realize that it was truly something happening to a lot of – if not every – women, in a vast variety of situations, context and ways. We also connected the dots and got to fully see that it was happening to many people presenting a difference to society’s “normality”, such as LGBQ-identified people, trans*, fat people, persons with mental disabilities, and the list could go on and on and on.

“Stop Harcèlement de Rue” (“Stop Street Harassment”) started in Paris in March 2014, and then spread across France. The local section of Lyon emerged 6 months later, and we started with no means to raise awareness among people. One of the best tools to use against street harassment has been the Internet and the mainstream culture it carries. For example, Thomas Mathieu has his Tumblr “Projet Crocodiles” (“Crocodile Project”), where he uses real situations that women send to him, often about street harassment, and transforms them into comic strips with men represented as crocodiles of the urban jungle. It became very popular. Other cartoonists started to talk about the subject, like Diglee in her blog. It was like we – the civil society, artists, people – had taken the “red pill” (cf. Matrix) and it was just impossible not to see it and impossible to go back.

We decided that we had to take these drawings to the streets and to the schools, to make people think about the issue through them, especially young people, and to hopefully deeply change the way many people are treated in our common public spaces. So we asked Thomas Mathieu and Diglee for their permission. They were very happy to give us the use of their work. We turned to our Facebook and Twitter followers, our friends and family, and ultimately many people have supported us as we’ve collected the money needed to print the drawings in high quality, large and rigid format, and create a proper exhibition to be shown everywhere.

Stop Street Harassment’s Safe Public Spaces Mentoring Program came at the right time for us, and we got selected, to our great joy. The funding has helped us with the printing costs, too. We’re now midway through our project, and so much already happened, including media coverage of our campaign:

* We tested a first version of the exhibition in a bar on the 3rd of September, and we got a lot of positive feedback, plus some institutions got in contact with us to have it shown at their locations.

At the “Clochards Célestes” theater

* We presented the exhibition on an “equality boat” lent by the region Rhône-Alpes during two evenings, the 1st and 2nd of October, in the presence of the cartoonists and as an introduction to debates. People participated a lot and the exchanges were great.

On the Région Rhône-Alpes’ “equality boat” navigating on the Rhône

* We worked with the town of Grenoble to present the exhibition during a week in the streets, in a really huge size, from the 7th to 13th of October. A lot of people saw it and stopped by, and we got a lot of good comments, both from the town officers and the public.

On Valentin Huïy’s place in Grenoble. Oct. 2015

* We took our exhibition to a high school for our very first school intervention. It was there for a week, from the 12th to 16th or October. The students were very interested and so was the teaching team. It was a success.

Neuville-sur-Saône high-school, exhibition and workshop

We’re now looking forward to adding drawings and texts to our first version, to send the final one to the printer! It’s a long job, but we’ve already been rewarded for it, so it is just a matter of time. 2016 will see a beautiful new tool to fight street harassment, first in Lyon and Rhône-Alpes, and then through France entirely.

Anne Favier is the co-founder of Stop Harcèlement de Rue in Lyon, France.

Check Out Our New Look!

October 25, 2015 By HKearl

Thank you also to our website designer Sarah of Sarah Marie Lacy Studios. I highly recommend her for a website upgrade or launch!

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