Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

USA: Street Harassment on college campuses: Does size matter?

By

By: Taylor Kuether, Minnesota, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

My experience with street harassment has happened almost exclusively during my college years. I go to a mid-size state school in northwestern Wisconsin, and the harassment seems to follow a pattern: The number of catcalls rises and falls with the temperatures. Every spring, the first day I deem it warm enough to wear shorts, I can count on someone making a loud comment about it, usually from across the campus mall. If I decide to go on my first bike ride of the season, I know I’m going to hear men shouting at me from passing cars. And once the height of summer hits, if a friend and I want to go floating (tubing down the Chippewa River, which runs right through our campus), we should expect to hear lewd comments aimed at us as we carry our inner tubes to the riverfront.

Being yelled at as I try to live my life doesn’t make me feel comfortable or safe. It isn’t something anyone should leave the house expecting or calculate into their day. But in my experience, at least before this summer, the comments were just that – comments.

This summer, I’m living in Minneapolis – a much larger city than my college town – for an internship. Minneapolis is home to the University of Minnesota, a Big 10 school with an enrollment of about 50,000. And on any given weekend night, you can find many of those students in “Dinkytown,” the city’s college bar district.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I went out for a drink in Dinkytown. Just 20 minutes into our outing, a college-aged man came up to us on the sidewalk and tried to put his arm around me, asking us where we were headed. I was surprised, but I shrugged it off as my friend and I kept walking, wordlessly, heading to the next bar.

Once inside, we tried to go upstairs, only to find a second college-aged male who took it upon himself to drunkenly block us from doing so. He stood squarely in front of me, slurring pickup lines at me and making it impossible to ascend the stairs. Annoyed, I grabbed his shoulder and moved him out of our way.

At our last stop of the night, a burrito place where we were hoping to grab some food before heading home, a third college-aged man came up behind my friend, pressed himself against her, and asked her what she was up to. It was the third time in a span of maybe two hours that someone had come up to us and physically entered our space. This wasn’t the street harassment I was used to – words thrown from afar with the space between  my harasser and me acting as a buffer, a safety net.  This was much more aggressive, much more invasive.

I’ve speculated as to why there is such a difference: Is it the size of the school? Is it the presence of Greek life (my school doesn’t have it; at U of M it’s huge)? Is it the size of the city the school is in?

I’ve always assumed college-aged men think they can get away with harassment for three reasons: one, their new found freedom and lack of supervision, two, their age and lack of maturity, and three, the anonymity afforded by the sheer size of a college campus.

At a big school, your own stupid actions can disappear into the much larger sea of stupid actions. At a big school, you can “get away” with more – after all, if you’re not the only one doing it, it must not be wrong, right?

What have your own experiences been with street harassment on college campuses? Did the size or location of the school impact the harassment you experienced or witnessed?  Leave a response on the blog or tweet at me at @taylorkuether.

Taylor Kuether is a senior journalism student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconsin. She has previously written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, worked as a reporter at her city’s daily newspaper, The Leader-Telegram, and its arts and culture publication, VolumeOne, hosted a local-music centered radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio, and worked as Editor-in-Chief at her student newspaper, where she enjoyed writing biting, slightly rant-y columns about feminist issues.

Share

Video Interview with Tatyana Fazalizadeh

By

Here’s a great video interview from Quiet Lunch Magazine with artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, the person behind the amazing “Stop Telling Women to Smile” project. Don’t forget, you can now bring her art work to your community!

“The posters are directed toward men…but the posters are really for women. When they walk past it, I want them to feel like they have a voice, they have an advocate for them, they have somebody out there speaking up for them.” – Tatyana

After featuring her work on the Stop Street Harassment blog periodically since Oct. 2012, I’m excited to FINALLY meet her in person on Sunday to discuss possible collaboration!

Share

Afghanistan Street Harassment Documentary

By

“Do Not Trust My Silence” is a powerful new short film about street harassment in Afghanistan (English subtitles), directed by Afghan filmmaker Sahar Fetrat. She won the first prize in Italy’s “Universocorto Elba Film Festival” for her “extreme courage of reporting the Afghan women’s condition in the streets of Kabul and for the technique of shooting with a hidden camera.”

She writes:

“‘Do Not Trust My Silence’ was my fourth film which was produced in April 2013 and it is one of my favorites. When I first joined the Afghan voice’s media training, I had the vision of making a documentary about street harassment. This documentary for me is more than just a 10-minute film, there is a lot in it. There is a big pain in it that all women, especially Afghan women, can feel. This documentary shows only a little of what we see, feel and experience every day.

When I made this film, I knew that both women and men should be my audience. For men to see and feel a part what we experience every day, and for women to say no to street harassment. I wanted to show that, as a young woman, I do not accept harassment as my destiny and other women should do the same.

While producing this film, I put myself as the main character and I filmed most of the parts with a small flip camera. It was not easy to film men while harassing me or other women, some of them were throwing small rocks towards us. But I did not stop my work because my aim was to show harassment and how destructive it is. I totally believe that we women are strong enough to not give up and fight against it and we have the power to stop it.”

H/T to SSH’s SPS Mentoring Program Mentee Masooma Maqsoodi

Share

Egypt: Racist analysis of street harassment undermines the fight against it

By

When I first saw the call for volunteers on SSH, my first instinctive thought was, “So this really does happen in the U.S. too.” When I joined the SSH team, I realized that my social media colleagues came from places that we unthinkingly refer to as “developed,” and therefore assume to be devoid of street harassment. Growing up, I would often hear friends say that they can only wear what they want on holiday abroad because home in Egypt was the only place where we had to deal with things like catcalls, especially if we’re wearing a revealing outfit. For a long time, I accepted these ideals as facts.

By the time the Egyptian revolution took place, I saw a whole new side to street harassment- mob attacks, deliberate sexual violence and so on.  Since then, the problem with talking about street harassment in Egypt became more about people outside the region had to say to us about the issue. In many analyses and comments, street harassment was portrayed as an “Egyptian problem” – some horrific, unchangeable, and, most importantly, exclusive reality to Egypt.  Anyone living in Egypt knew that while less violent forms of street harassment may take place in other countries, it was difficult to make a similar claim of the type of mob attacks that were happening in our country. Nevertheless, the type of claims made by Western media provided the incentive to embark on movements and organizations that would give alternative explanations to street harassment in Egypt.

Then the infamous Delhi gang rape case made it to headline news. In the aftermath of the incident, I heard many confidently make the claim that India was no place to visit because “they have a rape problem.” What surprised me was that some Egyptians also jumped on that argument despite their continued effort to prove that Egypt and Egyptian culture were not pro- sexual violence.  Again, the same headlines appeared classifying rape as an “Indian problem”; some explicitly classified sexual violence as a “third world”, “Asian”, “Arab” or “Muslim” issue.

And yet again, most people could recognize the prevalence of catcalls in the US or Europe, but no one ever thought of comparing them to either the Tahrir mob attacks or Delhi’s gang rape crisis.

And then Steubenville rape happened in the USA, and it became impossible not to acknowledge that the “West” or the “developed world” suffered from the same issues of sexism and patriarchy that explain the prevalence of catcalls and ultimately, rape. Of course, Steubenville is neither the first nor the only incident of its type. The only difference is that so many more people were now aware of the double standards employed in the discussions about street harassment.

It is impossible to overlook the manner in which racist analyses of street harassment can and have undermined the fight against it. We often hear and share stories about negative perceptions to street harassment, the most important of which is denial. Denial functions on many levels, the most condescending of which involves a certain blindness to the parallels between Tahrir, Delhi, Steubenville, and many others. Sexual violence is not a problem inherent to any one culture; it is a global problem.

Yasmine Nagaty is a Political Science graduate and an aspiring writer from the American University in Cairo and currently works at the Egyptian NGO Misr ElKheir. You can follow her on Twitter.

Share

New Resources from Australia

By

“Conceptual understandings and prevalence of sexual harassment and street harassment” is a new publication by Bianca Fileborn, a Research Officer with ACSSA at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Here’s the overview:

“This Resource Sheet provides an overview of the existing research on women’s experiences of sexual harassment and street harassment. It also considers conceptual models of sexual violence that are inclusive of these experiences.

Women’s experiences of street harassment and sexual harassment are focused on in this paper. It is acknowledged that men can also be the victims of this behaviour. However, street harassment and sexual harassment are highly gendered occurrences. Women are overwhelmingly the victims and men the perpetrators. The language adopted throughout this Resource Sheet reflects this gendered reality.

Further, the conceptual model of sexual violence discussed later in this publication (the continuum model of sexual violence) applies more specifically to women’s experiences of sexual violence across their life course. That is, women experience a broad range of sexual violence (ranging from the relatively “minor” to severe forms of sexual violation) at rates considerably higher than men. Further, while rates of victimisation remain relatively steady for women across their life course, rates of victimisation against men tend to decline across their life course (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2006).

Key Messages:

* Sexual violence, as a form of violence against women needs to be conceptualised in a way that reflects women’s actual experiences, ranging from relatively “minor” forms of sexual violence through to sexual assault and rape.

* The harm of sexual violence is not always directly correlated with the perceived seriousness of the behaviour. Individual women experience forms of sexual violence differently. The context behaviour occurs in also plays a role in mediating its harm.

* All forms of sexual violence are interconnected, and are underpinned by the same social and cultural attitudes.

* Sexual harassment and street harassment are highly prevalent and common experiences for women. They are often not talked about and not taken seriously as harm (particularly street harassment).

* Sexual harassment and street harassment need to be included in policy and legislation targeted at preventing or responding to sexual violence.

* Information on current responses and disclosure mechanisms is also provided towards the end of this resource.”

Share