Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Harassment Hotline

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Should employers be responsible if their employees harass women in public, while the employee is on the job?

Recently I read Deborah Thompson’s article “‘The Woman in the Street:’ Reclaiming the Public Space from Sexual Harassment” (a 1994 article in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism) and I like her ideas on this topic.

“While Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination] was never intended to apply outside the workplace, its hostile environment principles provide a useful framework from which to develop a liability regime to protect all women who are street harassed by ‘men at work.’

This regime would hold employers vicariously liable for public sexual harassment by their employees if the employer failed to warn workers that street harassment is intolerable, failed to implement as system by which members of the public could formally file a complaint, or failed to take remedial action when members of the public complained about harassment by their employees.

It would be relatively easy to develop a complaint procedure for street harassment. For example, instead of signs on the back of company trucks that read, ‘How’s my driving, call 1-800-555-1212,’ trucks and taxis could display signs that read, ‘If the driver of this vehicle harasses you, call 1-800-555-1212.’

Similarly at construction sites, there should be a number for women to call to complain about harassment by workers. Such a ‘Harassment Hotline’ would be a first step in ending the hostile environment of outdoor workplaces.

It would send a valuable message that a particular company cares about its image and does not tolerate workers who invade and bombard communities with sexual harassment…

In sum, the societal interest of promoting the privacy, safety, mobility, and equality of women should outweigh the desire of employees to engage in recreational sexual harassment while on the job.”

What do you think?

Here are two stories submitted by contributors who were able to report a harassing man or men to the employer and meet with success. And it would be even easier to make these kinds of reports if the number to call regarding harassment was prominently posted.

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Transgender Day of Remembrance

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This has been Transgender Awareness Week and today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

“Said Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart, ‘In all the work we do at Lambda Legal, we are fighting for a basic principle: everyone has the right to be true to their sexuality, gender identity and gender expression and to live, work and love with dignity and equality. This is a core American value. Yet transgender people in this country too often face harassment, discrimination and physical violence. This is unacceptable and must end.’

Transgender folks face a lot of street harassment, from both cismen and ciswomen (“cis” means people who identify with the gender identity they were assigned at birth).

For example, you may remember earlier in the year I wrote about assault incidents by cismen against transwomen in Queens. Two men assaulted Leslie Mora with a belt buckle in a targeted hate crime. Less than a month later, men shouted anti-gay slurs and threatened to slit the throat of Carmella Etienne. They also threw rocks and a beer bottle at her, and the resulting injuries left her in the hospital. The New York Daily News reported that “Etienne is now afraid to leave her home” and quoted her as saying, ‘The law will hopefully bring them to justice. I love being myself.’”

It is unfair and not right that just being oneself can mean so much hate and violence.

In the context of the work I primarily do (men harassing women), I want to share a few people’s thoughts.

On the Community Feministing blog, contributor Josh T. wrote about the specific harassment and difficulties transpeople face in public spaces.

I am trans bashed on the street constantly. People who present as cismen will start yelling, getting upset, moving to the other side of the street as if I am scary, a threat. Groups of teenagers will discuss me as I walk by; what ‘it’ is… I also experience this strange highbred of bashing and catcalling when someone simultaneously mocks my presentation and sarcastically expresses attraction. My experience is different from what ciswomen experience on the street. Ciswomen are followed and targeted by cat calling because of their proximity to fitting into the predefined role of men’s inferior. Trans folk have these experiences because we don’t fit. But both groups are targets of the everyday vocalizations that reassert male supremacy because we are the other. We are not men, so we are objects.

Blogger Bird of Paradox also wrote about street harassment a few months ago.

Street harassment happens. To me and to other trans women. Every day, everywhere. It’s cissexist and trans-misogynistic. It’s hate speech and it’s violence….Possibly the worst thing about it, in those moments when it happens and in thinking about it later, is the sense of helplessness coupled with the awareness of just how exposed, how vulnerable, how much of a minority we are. It’s depressing that cis people feel entitled to lash out with such casual violence in the first place – because, for them, there are no consequences for their hate speech. They’re not the ones who have to try to make their way through a life where they’re outnumbered by a ratio of thousands to one, a life where hostile scrutiny of their every move is the default.

To date, there have been 99 recorded murders of transgender persons in the United States for 2009. Outrageous. Yet there are police officers who trivialize and dismiss the harassment and assault experiences of transwomen. This is true for many ciswomen too, but officers also may unfairly judge a transwoman or question her identity, deterring transwomen from seeing law enforcement as a viable option for seeking justice and staying safe.

Rebecca Ashling wrote a comment about this on a Bird of Paradox’s blog post. “It would never occur to me to actually make any complaints about transphobic harrasment [sic] to the police. I know instinctively that I don’t belong to any of the categories of people they would take seriously.”

A positive recent change is that through The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, crimes against transgender people are now recognized as hate crimes. This is the first time a federal law has included protections for transgender people.

Mara Keisling, the Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said about the occasion, “Every day transgender people live with the reality and the threat of personal violence, simply because of who they are. This must end and it must end now. The new law provides for some vital first steps in preventing these terrible crimes as well as addressing them when they occur.”

I hope that the law does lead to an improved climate of acceptance and non-hostility toward all transpeople, including on the streets. And I hope that awareness weeks and days of remembrance like today can help, too.

Also, here are is good info for cispeople on how to be good allies and transgender 101 info.

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He walks the wooded trail, she walks the well-lit road

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Today on my bus ride home from work, I ran into a woman I recognized from a volunteer grocery delivery route I do monthly. We had never met before and did so today. It turns out we live near each other. During our conversation, I mentioned how grateful I am for the wonderful paths everywhere in our area to run on and to walk my new dog. She said that her husband loves walking on a wooded path near their home but that she sticks to the main roads because she doesn’t feel safe anywhere else (and she’s probably in her early 50s. When does the fear end?) Now that it’s dark when we get home from work (we both have over an hour commute each way), she said she only sticks to main roads that are well lit for her walks.

I’ve always been told not to go walking or running alone in the dark. I remember being so jealous of one of my high school cross country guy friends who used to go on moonlit runs down a bikepath near our house on the weekends. My male cross country coach was an ultra runner and used to do all night trail runs on Friday nights. Now that I have a dog and it’s winter, I have to go out in the dark in order to walk him. Sometimes I run with him up and down the street near my home where it’s well lit because it’s dark elsewhere but we both need the exercise; I can’t put him on the treadmill with me. I’m grateful that I feel safe enough to run anywhere in my area in daylight and it would be nice to feel safe enough to run anywhere in the dark. There are 3+ more months until daylight savings!

One chapter of the street harassment book I’m working on talks about the fear so many women have in public in different circumstances and contexts and the various ways we restrict our freedom in public because of it. Not going out alone in the dark is just one of a chapter-full.

Even though I know all this, I was still struck by the matter-of-fact way my new friend – who doesn’t know I work on street harassment issues – talked about the gender difference in safety. She doesn’t feel safe on the trails while her husband does and so she doesn’t go on them while he does. It seemed to me that for her, she sees that restriction as just life. And that’s true for so many of us. It’s so ingrained in us that we don’t even question how crazy unfair it is that just because we are female we’re unsafe (and/or told we’re unsafe) in public.

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“A sad tale of harassment”

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I am a 23 year old Muslim black female student from the north west of England. I have been continually harassed on the street when coming home from work or university. The men are mainly of Asian or Kurdish descent from the neighbourhood I live in. Despite the fact that I am a confident woman and don’t dress up provocatively, I still get harassed by older who ask for my number and others who call me names. Although there is nothing physical about it, it is unbelievably destroying in terms of self esteem and makes me feel dirty and unsafe. the thing that drive me mad even more is the fact that the white population are unaware of the problem because they are the majority and everyone reveres them.

– anonymous

Location: NW England

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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Metro Stalker

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Although I am verbally and sometimes physically harassed literally every time I walk to and from the DC metro to my work place, the most recent incident was the most disturbing.

Waiting in the metro station for my train, i heard a male voice saying “Hey sweetie” over and over again while I read a book, and then was approached by a very tall male who proceeded to “praise” me with what he must have considered “compliments” about my appearance. He asked a series of questions, very aggressively, so I felt pressured to comply and answer, though I lied about my name and where i was headed, where I lived, etc., and di not feel comfortable telling him, I’m a lesbian, I have a long-term partner, because those sounds like excuses with the potential to infuriate. He grabbed my hand and wrote his number on it, pressing so hard it cut my skin, and proceeded to ask about me calling him, demanding details about this future call.

When the train arrived, he got on the same car as me, despite telling me he lived in the opposite direction of my train. I tried to sit away from him, but he continued trying to speak with me across rows of seats and passangers. At a high-traffic stop, I snuck off behind another passanger. When he spotted me through the large window on the platform, he was obviously very angry, and stood up. He was moving quickly for the door, but they had shut and the train was moving. I let a few trains pass and took a longer, more complicated transfer pattern from train to train to ensure I didn’t see him again.

While the entire thing was obvious annoying, it goes beyond that – that kind of control exhibited over you in a public sphere is disempowering and disoriented, and shakes a person’s sense of confidence and safety. The anger on his face and his attempt to get off at the arbitrary station I chose sincerely lead me to believe he had plans for following me to the false end-point I’d told him, which is TERRIFYING unto itself, but especially in conjunction with the series of media stories detailing the indifference and non-action of public transportation attendants/others in the general public.

– Jess

Location: Washington, D.C.

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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