By Britnae Purdy, SSH Correspondent
When I first heard about Michaela Cross’s story, a young woman’s accountof how the street harassment she experienced while studying abroad in India left her with Post-Traumatic Stress-Disorder, I was intrigued. At the same time, I did not want to read it for fear of somehow either reliving or negating my own experiences with street harassment in a foreign country. Eventually I read her story, and decided that I wanted to share my own experiences with street harassment abroad and dealing with those experiences upon returning to the United States – an ordeal that I ultimately found more painful than the original harassment.
When I was eleven years old, my family moved to Kingston, Jamaica. Let me stop you right there, because if you’re not familiar with the country, I know what you may be thinking: I did not go to school under a coconut tree. Bob Marley was not the soundtrack of my life. I do not have dreadlocks.
Jamaica, much to many people’s surprise, is not the fantasy vacation-land that we see on TV commercials. Don’t get me wrong – I have seen some of the most incredible beauty of my life while living in Jamaica. Jamaica is a paradise – but the Sandals Resort-esque paradise that many Americans think of only exists for those who can afford it. I lived in the capital, Kingston, which was at the time the “murder capital” of the world. Just as vivid to me as the incredible blue ocean and the lush mountains are the rows of zinc-roofed shacks, starved dogs in the street, and the armored bus I took to school in the mornings. As an American living in Jamaica, sponsored by the embassy, I was incredibly privileged – luckily for me, my parents made a point of making sure I recognized that privilege and never took it for granted.
I experienced street harassment for the first time while living in Jamaica (I had never even heard the term before), and I experienced it consistently for the nearly four years that we lived there. Characteristics that made me one of a dozen in my previous hometown in Michigan – light skin, blond hair, blue eyes – meant I stuck out like a sore thumb in Kingston. I was hypersexualized by strangers and classmates, despite the fact that, at eleven, I had just gotten my first kiss and was still figuring out how to put on eye shadow. My sexually-based street harassment was also mixed with racial and economic tones– whereas in Michigan I was a level-headed middle-class scrawny kid, in Kingston I was often seen as the rich, white American – the spoiled foreigner. I ultimately thrived in Jamaica, but the harassment was very painful.
Still, the hardest experience was when I returned to the United States at fifteen years old. In my new town in Virginia, I once again blended entirely into the crowd – when I wasn’t harassed on the streets or in the school halls during my first couple of weeks back, I assumed that I deeply unattractive. While the harassment in Jamaica scared me, the sudden lack of sexual attention in the United States left my self-confidence floundering. I felt like I was melting into a new sense of invisibility. The anonymity was both painful and comforting, but most of all I felt lonely.
None of my new classmates could relate to my experiences living abroad – when I mentioned that I once got “riot days” off of school during elections, one girl stared at me blankly and said, “Wait, I thought you were from Jamaica? Aren’t they like, always happy there?” Another boy asked me “which island in Jamaica” I had lived on and when the last time I had seen Bob Marley was. And yes, I did get that wonderful Mean Girls rip-off line often – “If you’re from Jamaica, why are you white?” I had been a foreigner in Jamaica, and now I felt alienated in America as well. I couldn’t even talk about my day-to-day experiences in another country – talking about the sexual harassment I experienced abroad was out of the question, especially when at the young age of fifteen I was so deeply confused about what constituted negative and positive sexual attention. I buried the memories.
In fact, I didn’t talk or think about it again until I started college, which was also the next time I experienced regular street harassment. The first time I was harassed on an American street, I felt betrayed and shaken – up to that point, I had only experienced street harassment in Jamaica. I thought this practice belonged somewhere else; I wondered what I had done wrong. All those feelings from my earlier years in Jamaica came flooding back – bracing my shoulders walking down the street, a borderline irrational fear of walking alone, a prickly feeling down my spine whenever a stranger approached.
I’ve traveled extensively since living in Jamaica, but unfortunately my default setting when traveling abroad is still to expect that level of harassment. In some places I’ve been harassed, in others I haven’t – but I still find myself unable to keep from switching the rational side of my brain over to the side that is instinctively scared of strangers on the street. Michaela Cross was diagnosed with PTSD after her continued harassment – I don’t believe that applies to me, but my harassment has definitely changed my pattern of behavior and expectations when traveling abroad. It is exhausting to constantly be on alert like that, and it detracts from the pleasure of traveling. Traveling is about placing yourself outside of your comfort zone, without comparison to your daily routines – but for women, letting down our guard can also be dangerous.
I am grateful to Michaela Cross for pointing out a gap –there are very few safe spaces to discuss street harassment abroad. I believe that part of this stems from the fear of conveying racism or prejudices. Cross’s story has garnered quite a bit of attention – while some responses are well thought-out and point to varying opinions and experiences, others are disgustingly laced with bigotry, whether towards Indian men or towards Cross.
If we say that we experienced street harassment while in Country X, the mind may jump to assuming that all men from Country X are street harassers, or that sexual harassment is somehow a cultural, racial, or ethnic characteristic. That’s ridiculous. I would never attribute my street harassment in Jamaica to the entire Jamaican nationality. But like Cross, I also had difficulty learning how to speak clearly about my more negative experiences in a foreign country. If I casually mention to a friend at college that a man yelled profanities at me while I walked back from class, she would understand – our campus is generally very safe, but there is a certain road where everyone knows street harassment is common. If I try to discuss, however, the time I was harassed outside a popular restaurant in Kingston, she has no way of placing that experience into a larger concept of what Jamaica is really like. I don’t want to paint a false paradise of the cities I’ve traveled to – that locks me into a mindset that harassment isn’t a big deal, or that harassment is shameful issue that I must deal with personally and quietly. But I also don’t want to spread unnecessarily negative connotations about places that I, for the most part, loved.
Societal norms are not the same as cultural practices, and the level to which sexism and street harassment are publicly tolerated in any given society is not indicative of the “quality” of the people of that country. However, allowing experiences with street harassment abroad to fester without examining them and placing them into a larger context of gender inequality may result in a bias against that country that may border on bigotry. We need safer places to discuss harassment abroad, and perhaps more importantly we need a better language for both sharing and listening to others’ stories.
I applaud Michaela Cross for sharing her experience. Though I don’t relate to everything she said, I can respect her story for being just that – her story. I am sharing my story because it is mine and it is precious and it contains my truths. I do not expect my story to speak for others – I certainly hope Cross did not expect hers to do so. Take from it what you need, and leave what you do not. If my experiences are different from yours, that does not make either of us less valid or relevant. That is what feminist story-sharing is all about.
And for the record? I wouldn’t trade my time living in Jamaica for the world. The street harassment I faced there was a part of my experience – it by no means the sum of my experience.
Britnae is a graduate student at George Mason University, in Virginia, where she is pursuing a Master of Arts in Global Affairs with a specialization in Security and Conflict Studies. She also writes for First Peoples Worldwide and you can read more of her writing on their blog and follow her on Twitter.
