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Egypt: Successful “Eid without Harassment” Campaign

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By Nihal Saad Zaghloul, Co-Founder of Imprint Movement in Egypt who gave me permission to share this here.

This is our media statement of what happened during 9th and 10th of August on Talaat harb.

Imprint Movement and Anti-Sexual Harassment movement launched a campaign called “Eid without Harassment” which took place on Talaat harb square and street on the 9th and 10th of August from 4 until 10 p.m.

We divided ourselves between three teams: patrolling, awareness, and operations. We spoke and interacted with bystanders about the importance of rejecting this crime and rejecting violence.

Achievements:

* The prevention of 65 individual (verbal and physical) sexual harassment incidents
* The prevention of five mass harassment incidents.
* Two reports filed at the Tahrir police station.
* 70 people volunteered

We continue to work relentlessly on finding a grass root solution for this crime through the effective participation of the entire society. 

Help us build a better community.

Imprint Team.

Photos: Day1  | Day 2 

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High School Student’s Year-Long Project on Street Harassment

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Cross-posted with permission from Surayya’s blog.

My name is Surayya I. Diggs, I am a recent graduate of Elizabeth Irwin High School, and I will be attending Cornell University in the fall at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.  I have an interest in science and agriculture, but since I can remember I have also had a tremendous interest in race, feminism, and social justice.  In the more recent future I have become very interested in fighting street harassment.

In early August 2012, I found an opportunity to do something about the issue of street harassment. The ELLA Fellowship Program, a part of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project was an opportunity to carry out a 9-month community development project.

At the beginning of my fellowship I knew I wanted to make a documentary.  I thought that a video would be a great way to reach people because the Internet is becoming such a relevant part of today’s society, but I had never made a film in my life.  I began searching on YouTube for videos about street harassment to find some inspiration and figure out what I wanted to do differently with my film.  One of the videos I came across was, Totally Biased: NYC Women Talk About Cat Calling.  This was a very comedic, and almost offensive, approach to the issue of street harassment, and it only gave examples of street harassment. After watching this video, I watched a few more, and they each seemed to do the same thing, simply talk about cat calling and give alternate ways of approaching women, when the real issue is men feeling like they have the right to talk to women on the street in the first place.  After watching those videos I knew that I wanted my video to strike a different cord, I wanted to paint the picture of street harassment for people living in NYC, then show why it is dangerous, and finally give solutions to combat and end street harassment.

In November 2012, I conducted the first interview for my film on street harassment.  I was able to set up and conduct an interview with Nefertiti Martin at her office at Girls for Gender Equity.  I then spent the next 6 months interviewing and editing my film, converting over 6 hours of footage into a 10-minute documentary.  During the process, I was able to interview and observe the work of many significant players in the fight against street harassment including Chair of the Women’s Issues Committee and Council Member, Julissa Ferreras, Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, Founder of Stop Street Harassment, Holly Kearl, Co-Founder of Hollaback! Emily May, and many educated people that I interviewed on the street.

Here is my documentary:

Here is a shorter film that I made in December that shares the street harassment testimonies of students from my school:

Fishbowl

In addition to these films, I led several workshops in order to reach people on the ground.

On March 25, 2013, I guided a fishbowl at a Youth Summit for Street Harassment.  A fishbowl in simple words is a conversation; I called out different identities like gender, sexual orientation, and religion.  There was a small circle of 10 people in the center and over 100 people surrounding them that were listening to what was being said inside the smaller circle.  The fishbowl was a chance for people to share their personal experiences of street harassment and have people really listen to what is being said, this is something that can’t be accomplished with a simple discussion.  For most participants, their favorite part of the entire summit was the fishbowl.

IYLI workshopNext, I conducted a workshop on May 18, 2013 at the International Youth Leadership Institute where I talked to high schoolers from around NYC about the root issues and effects of street harassment, this was called the roots and branches activity, and then I had them think of an axe, a solution to the problem, which was meant to cut down the tree.   I did an identical workshop on May 20, 2013, for my old middle school, the Little Red School House.

Finally, on June 4, 2013, I directed an all-school assembly at my high school, Elizabeth Irwin High School.  During this assembly I screened my film and brought in Holly Kearl, founder of Stop Street Harassment, and community organizer at Girls For Gender Equity, Nefertiti Martin to speak on specific topics within the issue of street harassment.

Overall, it was a very successful fellowship and I learned a lot about filmmaking, planning, and street harassment.  I learned that filmmaking is about storytelling, which means not including everything even if you want to; because I had to cut out so much footage, there were some things I, regrettably, could not include, such as police harassment of men of color, sexualization of women in the media, and the power dynamic of women and men in society.  I learned that planning a youth summit and high school assembly requires great attention to detail and advanced planning.  I also learned that the most common form of street harassment is verbal, but it can escalate to the physical, such as groping and public masturbation.  Many people don’t understand the threat of violence that women have to deal with and the psychological effects of being called out at like a sexual object for the pleasure of heterosexual men.

The purpose of my fellowship was to educate participants and inspire them to do something about the issue of street harassment. I created my film in order to make men and women more sensitive to the effects of street harassment.  I want men to understand that most women do not appreciate being “complimented” and help women understand that you don’t have to just deal with street harassment, but you can do something about it.  Being able to show my video on the Stop Street Harassment website is a great opportunity and I hope there will be more platforms in the future to share my video.  In the mean time, please direct your family and friends to this article and YouTube to get my videoes out there and educate people on the issue of street harassment.

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Canada: They Asked for the Numbers

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By: Lisane Thirsk, Ottawa, Canada, SSH Correspondent

Last week, Hollaback! Ottawa released Our city, our space, our voice: A report on street harassment in Ottawa. The report is based on an online survey with more than 300 respondents, as well as testimony from an open forum.

Among other findings, it revealed that:

* 97% of respondents had experienced a form of street harassment in the past year
* 44% of respondents had experienced street harassment at least once on public transportation
* Only 10% of respondents had reported an incident of street harassment

The report has prompted some important conversation among Ottawa residents. It’s a conversation Hollaback! Ottawa’s site director Julie Lalonde initiated with city officials back in February after noting a trend in the stories submitted and mapped on the Hollaback! Ottawa website: street harassment was often taking place on buses or at bus stops.

But at the initial meeting requested by Julie, local government and public transit officials maintained that she didn’t have enough quantifiable evidence to show that street harassment is frequent on buses in Ottawa.

Julie isn’t one to be deterred. She wasted no time in calling on other local feminist organizations and Hollaback! volunteers, including myself, to help organize the forum, design the survey, and analyze the findings to better understand the problem and potential solutions.

The data compiled sheds light on a diversity of experiences (many truly horrifying), reveals other ‘hot spots’ where harassment occurs (libraries and parks), and captures the community’s determination to put an end to street harassment by engaging bystanders (amazing!).

In the lead-up to the report’s release, I had the opportunity to attend a series of follow-up meetings with Julie and city officials. The meetings became more productive and were likely granted urgency by the city following news coverage about a series of sexual assaults on buses.

Throughout these processes I kept reflecting on how the problem of street harassment was at first dismissed by officials claiming that the stories submitted to Hollaback! Ottawa weren’t themselves legitimate enough to justify further conversation.

Yet there are too many successful initiatives out there to ignore the benefits of crowdsourcing this type of information about violence against women.

Whenever skepticism about these types of initiatives blocks or delays action to stop violence, we need to ask some questions. Are women being silenced, either in person or online? Are we erasing the meaning survivors attribute to their own experiences? Why are those in positions of power so inclined to say, “But someone could have just fabricated those online submissions”?

I do understand the necessity of more traditional data-collection methods. Are there downsides to drawing conclusions from crowdsourced data? Yes. But are there also drawbacks to sexual violence data collected through formal surveys, interviews, focus groups or police records? Absolutely.

Above all, we can’t assume that all women feel safe and empowered to speak out and report street harassment, especially to authority figures. As in any country, survivors in Canada face both social and institutional barriers to reporting sexual violence. Here in Ottawa we heard over and over at the forum and in the survey responses, “Reporting is really hard.”

Hopefully the results of Hollaback! Ottawa’s report will spur more efforts to address street harassment throughout the city. The results paint a discouraging but unsurprising picture, considering the available statistics on the prevalence of street harassment globally. The low level of reporting in Ottawa is also in line with government studies showing that about one in ten sexual assaults are reported to police (Statistics Canada). With this in mind, the official number of reported sexual assaults on transit, for example, represents only a fraction of the problem in Ottawa.

What kinds of numbers will we require before taking concrete action to prevent street harassment?

To me, it’s not just the numbers that speak for themselves. The stories submitted online also speak volumes about the need for action. Let’s trust those voices too.

Lisane works in the non-profit communications sector and supports local anti-street harassment advocacy through Hollaback! Ottawa. In 2012, she completed a Master’s in Socio-Legal Studies at York University in Toronto, where she wrote her Major Research Paper on gender-based street harassment. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies and Spanish from the University of British Columbia.

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Kyrgyzstan: Taxi Drivers Intimidate Women

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By: Salidat Hamilova, in collaboration with Aikanysh Jeenbaeva, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, SSH Correspondents

English Version:

Very often men see it as their duty to guide women “onto the right path”, viewing themselves as the great moralizers and protectors of women’s morality, thus attempting to justify their harassment of us.

This “steering onto the right way” is achieved through constant admonitions, warnings, shaming, and sometimes direct intimidation of women and girls. The city of Bishkek, for instance, has witnessed the emergence of entire groups of individuals who seek to correct the “immoral” behavior of young women using methods of explicit intimidation and blackmail.

In this regard I would like to share a story of one young woman who came directly face to face with one of these intimidators:

This happened to a friend of mine, a young woman, whom, for the purposes of the story, we will call A. One time, returning from a birthday party, A. decided to take a taxi home. It was late, but she found a taxi near the house rented for the party and feeling fortunate, immediately approached it. The driver, a man, seemed trustworthy to her, since he was wearing a small hat that is usually worn during prayers and a short beard, which in our society is mistakenly taken as a sign of piousness and, therefore, decency. Moreover, the taxi had a sign of a well-known Bishkek taxi service on it, which added to its credibility.

Totally unsuspecting, A., who was in a hurry to get home, got in the taxi and the car drove away. However, after a couple of minutes, the decent and pious (as it seemed) taxi driver began asking A. strange questions, such as: “Why aren’t you at home? It is very late…”, “Don’t you respect your parents?”

This of course made her suspicious; meanwhile the taxi driver began to recount a story of how he recently drove home another client — a young girl who came out of a night club. After talking to her briefly, he came to the conclusion that she was ‘depraved’ and ‘flawed’, and as a punishment, dropped her off in an abandoned area, as far away from the needed destination as possible. He was bragging that before that he reduced her to tears by threatening her with physical violence.

Very frightened A. was forced to agree with him and his criticisms of her “bad behavior” and, trying to de-escalate the situation, explain to the schmuck that this was the first time she stayed out so late.

Suddenly, the car swerved from the main road and stopped near one of the city parks. The taxi driver, saying that he needed to meet someone, got out of the car and disappeared in the grove with several other men, who seemed to be waiting for him there. A., who at this point was terrified, in complete despair and completely clueless as to where to run in the dark and empty streets, decided to jump start the car and drive away to escape potential violence.

But just as she was trying to move to the driver’s seat, the man came back. He looked at A and having decided that she had been frightened enough, declared that he will take her home, if she promises to never again stay this late outside of home.

When I try to imagine what my friend must have felt during those moments, I simultaneously feel and understand her fear and admire her courage and wit – the idea to jump start and drive away the car was simply brilliant. While analyzing the situation, I try to put myself in her place and think about what I would do, what I would reply to the taxi driver and how I would react and sadly, I understand that there was not much that could have been done.

Where could one run away to at 3 AM in the middle of an empty road? How could one, in such a situation, change the mind of a self-righteous scumbag who was so sure of his ‘great’ role of “improving the moral appearance of young women”? The statement to the police would simply be ignored, since such cases are considered to be insignificant occurrences that distract police officers from “real and serious”crimes.

And this is not an isolated incident; there are many such “taxi drivers” who move around the city and intimidate young women. However, these cases are seldom talked about, since most girls who come face to face with them refuse to talk about their experience due to fear, sense of false shame, the reluctance to think about and remember what happened and other reasons.

But the most terrible thing is that such harassment is often mistaken for an expression of care and concern. I can provide a direct example here. When I shared with our common friend (who also knows the story) that I would like to write about this incident, she looked perplexed and asked me: “Why?! It was not harassment, he just scared her a bit as an older brother or a friend would!” This again illustrates that in our society harassment (even in extreme forms) is taken as a norm and even care!

Therefore, it is so important to talk about the different forms of harassment that we experience, share our stories and methods of reacting and resisting them and through this change the overall perception of harassment among the people and change ourselves.

Salidat is an undergraduate student at Kyrgyz National University and a dedicated volunteer at the Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ. Aikanysh graduated from the University of Freiburg with a degree in European Literatures and Cultures and recently from the Diplomatic Academy of the KR with a degree in International Relations. Aikanysh is a co-founding member and coordinator of the Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ.

Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ was founded in 2012 by activists from various communities of Bishkek city. Follow BFC SQ on Twitter, @bish_feminists and on Facebook.

 

Russian Version:

Автор: Салидат, в сотрудничестве с Айканыш.

Очень часто мужчины считают своим долгом “наставить женщин на истинный путь”, видят себя в качестве великих “морализаторов” и “охранников нравственности” женщин, тем самым оправдывая и обосновывая свои домогательства по отношению к нам. Это “наставление” осуществляется посредством постоянных предупреждений, пристыживания, а иногда и через прямое запугивание женщин и девочек. В Бишкеке, к примеру, появились целые группировки людей, которые стремятся исправить “безнравственное” поведение девушек, используя методы откровенного запугивания и шантажа. В этой связи, я хочу поделиться историей девушки, которая напрямую столкнулась с данным явлением.

Одна моя знакомая, назовем ее А., задержавшись на вечеринке в честь дня рождения подруги, решила вернуться домой на такси. Время было позднее, но она увидела такси недалеко от арендованного для вечеринки дома и, обрадовавшись такой удаче, сразу же подошла к машине. Водитель – мужчина вызвал у нее доверие, так как был в шапочке, которую носят во время молитвы и с небольшой бородой, что у нас в обществе ошибочно воспринимается как признак религиозности и порядочности. Тем более на машине была шашка известной службы такси Бишкека.

Ничего не подозревающая и спешащая домой А. села в такси и машина тронулась. Однако, уже через пару минут благообразный и верующий (с виду) таксист начал задавать ей странные вопросы: “Почему ты не дома? Поздно ведь…”, “А родителей своих ты уважаешь?”.

Это конечно не могло не заставить ее насторожиться, а таксист тем временем начал рассказывать моей знакомой историю о том, как недавно подвозил одну клиентку – девушку вышедшую поздно вечером из клуба. Разговаривая с ней, он пришел к выводу, что она “испорченная” и в наказание за это решил высадить ее в пустынном месте, подальше от нужного адреса. Таксист похвастался, что перед высадкой он довел ее до слез, угрожая физической расправой. Сильно напуганная А. была вынуждена соглашаться с ним и с критикой своего поведения и, пытаясь выйти из ситуации, объяснять подонку, что впервые задерживается так поздно.

Внезапно, машина свернула с основной дороги и остановилась возле одного из парков города. Таксист, сказав что ему нужно кое с кем встретиться, вышел из машины и скрылся в роще с несколькими другими мужчинами, которые очевидно ждали его там. А., пребывая в ужасе и отчаянии, и не зная, куда бежать по темным и пустынным улицам, решила завести и угнать машину, чтобы избежать потенциального насилия.

Но как только она начала пересаживаться на переднее сидение, вернулся таксист. Посмотрев на А. и решив, что она достаточно напугана, он заявил, что передумал ее наказывать и отвезет ее домой при условии, что она больше не будет оставаться допоздна вне дома.

Когда я представляю себе, что пережила моя знакомая в те моменты, я одновременно понимаю ее страх и восхищаюсь ее храбростью и смекалкой – решением не увеличивать агрессию водителя и оригинальностью идеи угнать машину. Анализируя эту ситуацию, я пыталась поставить себя на ее место и предположить, что можно было ответить водителю, как среагировать, что сделать и поняла, что, к сожалению, вариантов было очень мало. Куда можно было убежать в 3 часа ночи на пустой трассе? Как можно было в такой ситуации переубедить ограниченного подонка, уверенного в свое правоте и в своей “великой” роли “улучшать моральный облик” девушек? Заявление в милицию проигнорировали бы сами сотрудники правоохранительных органов, так как такие происшествия считаются несерьезными и отвлекающими внимание милиции от “настоящих”, серьезных преступлений…

И ведь это не единичный случай: таких “таксистов” разъезжающих по Бишкеку и запугивающих девушек множество. Просто такие происшествия замалчиваются самими девушками из страха, нежелания вспоминать об этом, из чувства ложного стыда и т.д. Но самое ужасное то, что иногда такое домогательство вопринимается как опека и забота о тебе. Могу привести конкретный пример. Когда я рассказала нашей общей подруге о том, что хочу написать об этой истории, то она недоумевая ответила: “Зачем?! Это не было домогательством, он всего лишь припугнул ее как старший брат, как друг!”, что еще раз показывает то, что в нашем обществе домогательство (даже в самых крайних формах) воспринимается как норма и забота!

Поэтому нам так необходимо говорить о домогательствах, делиться историями и способами борьбы с ними, менять представление людей и меняться самим…

 

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London: New Transit Campaign, #ProjGuardian

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More and more authorities are addressing sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence on transit systems in comprehensive ways, including, most recently, London.

The British Transit Police worked with local activist groups to train officers and today they launch a Project Guardian campaign to tackle the issue. You can get involved by tweeting stories and information using the hashtag #ProjGuardian.

Via The Guardian:

“In the first initiative of its kind of this size, all 2,000 officers who police the city’s public transport network – including the underground, overground trains and the buses – have been trained to deal with sexual offences. Up to 180 officers at a time are to be deployed at stations as part of Project Guardian.

Ricky Twyford, an inspector and manager of the project, said the scheme was launched after transport bosses became increasingly concerned about the rising numbers of travellers citing safety and security concerns while using London transport.

One of the biggest fears in a recent survey of commuters was sexual harassment, which few women report.

“We hope this will send a message to everyone that we will not tolerate this behaviour,” said Twyford. “We want women to feel confident that they will be listened to and their complaints will all be taken seriously.”

Three women’s campaign groups – the End Violence against Women coalition, Hollaback and Everyday Sexism – were asked to help draft the guidelines and train staff after the police authorities studied a similar exercise in the Boston’s Massachusetts Bay transport authority…

Laura Bates, of Everyday Sexism, which has logged about 5,000 incidents from women of all ages describing sexism, harassment and assault on the transport network, has been one of the key advisers.

“What’s really exciting about Project Guardian is the extent to which the BTP [British Transport Police] have worked closely with us and listened from the very beginning to these real women’s stories, which means that vital aspects of the initiative such as believing the victim and taking every instance seriously, no matter how ‘minor, have been central to officer training.”…

Agencies involved in the London transport initiative include the Metropolitan and City London police, Transport for London and the British Transport Police.

Information will be publicised about how to complain, including the setting up of a crime helpline (0800 405 040) and text service (61016). Emergency cases should ring 999.”

Fabulous!

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