Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
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.
This week, SSH board member Manuel Abril distributed SSH materials in Tucson at an important conference. From Manuel:
“The Annual Youth and Peace Conference (YPC) is a unique Tucson event empowering youth to become courageous leaders and creative peace builders in our community. Youth violence is still considered by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to be an epidemic problem in America. Arizona’s youth violence and homicide rates are higher than the national average. I am an organizer of the Peace Conference but used my presence at the event to promote Stop Street Harassment’s mission as street harassment is often a young person’s introduction to the violence of public space. Public space is also the stage in which youth are called upon to internalize and enact their own marginalization when they curb or constrain their own movement to be safe.”
In mid-February, I spoke to a packed room at Centennial College in Toronto. Afterward, students could write pro-respect, anti-harassment messages on a poster for their campus.
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)
“Have you ever been cat called while out running or in other public places? Let’s chat about it. Join us on February 5th at 12pm EST with Runner’s World Chief Running Officer and the Mayor of Running Bart Yasso; Runner’s World’s Zelle; Stop Street Harrassment’s Holly Kearl; along with freelance journalist and author of the upcoming book Running: A Love Story Jen A. Miller, whose article “Wearing Her #Whorepants” took social media by storm.
Most of you are familiar with Twitter Chats. If not, the way, here’s how it works: we will tweet the questions, and you can give us your stories, perspectives, thoughts and ideas on how we can all work together to address these important issues of street harassment, cat calling and other harassment and violence in public places. The hashtag we will Tweet with is #RWsafety…
Here is a link to Jen’s story “Wearing Her #Whorepants.” Jen A. Miller has been a freelance journalist for the last 10 years, sticking with the work from home lifestyle because she likes running before lunch and working with her Jack Russell Terrier by her side. She’s a frequent contributor to Runner’s World, Running Times, Zelle, The New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer and her memoir, Running: A Love Story will be published by Seal Press in early 2016. “
This post is from our Safe Public Spaces Team in Kathmandu, Nepal. The SPSM projects are supported by SSH donors. If you would like to donate to support the 2015 mentees, we would greatly appreciate it!
Harassment in the streets of Kathmandu has been so normal that it is almost taken for granted. Street harassment like cat calling and explicit evaluative commenting can lead to bigger psychological repercussions in the future. The main aim of our Safe Public Spaces project, ‘Acts of Defiance’ is to help make Kathmandu a safe space for people of all ages to live in. Hence, Hollaback! Kathmandu acts as a catalyst to encourage the victim to fight back and raise their voice against street harassment. Our project entitled ‘Acts of Defiance’ was divided into two phases.
Our first phase of the project, Forum Theater was conducted in early January. The main objective of conducting the forum theater is to generate awareness in an interactive and participatory manner so that the students get a public platform to contribute their views and knowledge on street harassment and as well as inculcate the learning by doing methodology in them. The motive behind focusing on the youth is because this is the prime age to be aware about the dimensions of street harassment. The storyline of the forum theater revolved around the scenario of high school girls and how they are subjected to street harassment on a regular basis. Through the forum theater, we aimed to portray the life of a teenage girl on the street and on the public vehicle and showed the various kinds of harassment they faced every day.
We also wanted to exhibit their reactions to the harassment and the kind of reactions that bystanders showed when they saw someone being harassed. The drama was divided into two scenes and after each scene, the students were encouraged to come up with a better response –(both by the victim and a bystander) to the harassment scenario with the help of some brainstorming.
The session was fun and informative for the students which opened them up to the live action of the happenings in the community. It worked as a driving agent which led students to talk about their past experiences and encounters. Moreover, the audiences were informed about the existing law of our country related to the harassment and it also encourage them to fight back and to stimulate critical discussions around the issue of street harassment.
There were other actions we took, too.
On December 5, 2014, Hollaback! Kathmandu conducted a Self Defense session for about 50 female refugees for UNHCR Nepal. The session was provided to the refugees from diverse nations such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria and Vietnam. The primary goal of our self defense session was to provide the participants with basic tips on how to defend themselves should they ever come across harassment in public spaces. We aim to equip the most vulnerable groups with the necessary tips so that they can defend themselves. Ayesha, a twenty- three year old refugee from Pakistan said, “It was a very new experience for us. Earlier, we did not know that we could use our body as weapons. But after the session, we learned to use our body as a weapon to protect ourselves.”
We were featured in a local television media program on Social Advocacy to discuss on the issue of street harassment. The 30 minute interview session included different discussions on the situation of street harassment in Nepal and also threw light on the fact that street harassment is a global problem and that strict actions needed to be taken to mitigate it.
As part of the 16 Day Activism Campaign to End Violence Against Women, Hollaback! Kathmandu also organized a visit to the local women police station. The Police Center also has separate female constables to deal with the female victims of violence. Inspector Khadka said, “We try to solve the situation in a non-violent manner. If there is violence in a marriage, we give the husband a warning and try to settle the issue in a cohesive manner. We also provide counseling classes for men to sensitize them about gender. One of our volunteers, Aakriti shares her experience as, “Some of the new things that really amazed me was the fact that the police officials are not so cold-natured as we’ve heard about through other people. They were in fact very supportive when it came to issues regarding Women and Children.
Through December, we celebrated the Violence Against Women (VAW) Activism Campaign and conducted activities to aware the youths about the issue of street harassment. The session was led by our volunteers where a video related to women, violence was shown and the students were encouraged to have a discussion after watching the documentary.. In the VAW Session, our volunteers went across 9 schools and impacted 513 youths in total. Along with the informative session at schools and colleges, we also organized a #orangeurhood campaign where our volunteers made posters and youths from different backgrounds came together to support the campaign.
This had been an ecstatic ride for Hollaback! Kathmandu and we still seek for many ways to make the public spaces safer.