Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Afghanistan: Words Matter

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In our society, if a woman is known as being promiscuously or immoral, it is nearly impossible for her to free herself of that label.

Guest Blog Post for International Anti-Street Harassment Week 2015

When I speak about street harassment, I notice the ears of men go red. I wish it was out of shame or fear of it. Women face many different kinds of harassment and abuse in our society: physical, sexual and or mental.

I have often thought about how mental abuse and harassment can be one of the worse methods of marginalizing women. This kind of harassment cannot be seen and pointed to, but it can leave a lasting impact on people’s emotional and mental health. Unfortunately, I have also noticed that most women tolerate this kind of abuse in silence for many difference reasons. One of the reasons may be that they feel standing up to defend themselves is not effective. Especially in Afghanistan where religion and traditions have been mixed and hard to distinguish from one another, it is hard to prove to men that their behavior and the harassment they perpetuate is unjustified. In addition, these men have access to many different weapons to justify their behavior and silence anyone who objects. When it comes to shutting women up, the most efficient weapon has been character assassination.

Opinionated and educated women are more likely to be hunted down by this weapon because they are viewed as a threat to patriarchy. The men who attack these women know very well that if a woman is known as being promiscuously or immoral, it is nearly impossible for her to free herself of that label. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that usually women are attacked when they disobey the laws of our patriarchal society and stop bowing their head to misogynistic systems and structures. When women don’t submit to men’s power and desires, take ownership of their own bodies, view themselves as more than commodities and things or speak up using logic, their character is immediately assassinated.

The literature of this form of terror is simple, but specific. It is enough to call a woman certain things over and over at different settings and venues in order for her to be delegitimized. These words include but are not limited to promiscuous, immoral, prostitute, whore, infidel, man-hatter, angry, bitch…. Isn’t it fascinating that there are no male equivalents for the words bitch, whore, slut…?

If one tries to fight harassment by talking to misogynists as two fully developed human beings who are deserving of equal rights, if one decides to respect oneself and not give into this myth of female inferiority, one is immediately labeled shameless. If one uses logic, she is called infidel. If one points out to inappropriate behavior by men, she is called a man-hater.

Standing strong despite the devastating effects of these words is not easy, especially if a woman wants to have some public approval and impact. These words cause long term emotional and mental issues. They destroy women’s confidence and exhaust them. They break women’s spirits and tear them to pieces. Perhaps that is why one should learn how to gather one’s pieces and stand against the angry wave of misogyny.

By Farima Nawabi, cross-posted from the Dukhtarane Rabia (Daughters of Rabia): A blog on social justice in Afghanistan

Poster text: In our society, if a woman is known as being promiscuously or immoral, it is nearly impossible for her to free herself of that label.

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Afghanistan: Dignified Men

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They say women should remain silent to remain dignified. Is there anything that could take a man’s dignity and respect away?

Guest Blog Post for International Anti-Street Harassment Week 2015

A few days ago, I watched a man, who was about 20 years old, pinch a 10-year old girl’s bottom in public. When I defended her, the man looked at me and said, “Shut up, bitch.”

One fight got loud and passersby noticed, but what was surprising was that they were looking at me and the young girl with hatred and disbelief. As usual, in their eyes, it was the women who were at fault, not the perpetrator of this ugly act. Every day, through their words and actions, people tell women to be ashamed of themselves while their violators walk away with pride. Women must keep silent to remain dignified. To be respected, we must be silent. Is there anything that could take a man’s dignity and respect way?

When we read news, we all speak against the sexual assault of young girls, but is there a big difference between the violation of girls’ and women’s bodies in their homes versus when it is done in public on a daily basis? What makes one worthy of our condemnation and another our protection? Isn’t it that we tell women who have been raped to be silent as we do with women who are harassed? The harassment of women in public spaces is a manifestation of rape culture and a serious issue. It is true that street harassment is much more common, but this is no reason to think it is “natural” and “justified.” To end street harassment, we need to support women who are harassed- not silence them or shame them.

Our streets are not safe for women and this is a problem. It prevents girls from going to school, women from going to stores, and all from being independent human beings. Street harassment prevents women from working and becoming economically self-reliant. But most importantly, it makes women’s bodies public property- not their own. If something is deemed public, it will be abused and raped. We must fight this mindset. We must fight street harassment so that women are the owners of their own bodies and the sole decision makers for them. We must realize that existing in public does not make women’s bodies’ public property. Just like men, women can exist in public spaces while owning their bodies. We must recognize that women own their bodies and no one has the right to touch their bodies or talk about it without their permission.

By Hadisa Osmani, Dukhtarane Rabia (Daughters of Rabia): A blog on social justice in Afghanistan

Poster text: They say women should remain silent to remain dignified. Is there anything that could take a man’s dignity and respect away?

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Five Ways for Men to Fight Street Harassment

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The cause of street harassment is not in the way women dress, but in the way some men think.

When I was in middle school, our Islamic Studies teacher always told us about the concept of Enjoining good and forbidding evil, however he only applied the concept to women. We were 12 to 17 years old. Mere boys. He would tell us that if we saw women going to bazar too often or wearing bad hejab and “improper” clothes, we could prevent them from doing so. He would tell us to tell the women to stay at home, hit them or even kick them. He would tell us that it has sawab: that we would be reward. For a really long time, I really thought the teacher was right. I believed that women who didn’t dress “properly” were the only ones to be harassed and that they deserved it. Since then, I have opened my eyes and look around for myself. I have realized how wrong his teachings were. I have learned that it is not about what women are wearing because I have seen men harass girls who were wearing burqas. For many men harassment has become a hobby. I have realized that the problem is in the minds of these men. Street harassment is a men’s issue. I know that even now many of my classmates still think the teacher was right so contribute to a system that perpetuates women’s harassments and protects harassers. To fight harassment, we must understand it.

One of the worse things we could do is belittle the problem of street harassment. This is a very big problem for women in our country and we know who causes it. Ultimately, the problem will not end until those men who engage in it, stop harassing women. Some of these men do not realize what impact their actions have on women. They do not know that women don’t enjoy harassment. Some men seem to think that they have a right to make comments about women’s appearances. As a man, I know that no one gave them such a right. Not religion, not the Holy Quran, not even traditions. Nothing allows men to behave in this way. We should also realize that it doesn’t matter what women are wearing.

In addition to being inaccurate, it is simply presumptuous and rude to justify men’s behaviors because of women’s clothing. We, men, are not animals. We can control our mouths, our bodies and our thoughts. A woman’s clothing should not drive us wild. Another important part of the problem is the way in which people try to fight harassment. Rarely does anyone say, “stop harassing me because I am person and I want to be treated with respect.” Rather, people say, “would you want someone to treat your sister or mom this way?” The problem is that harassers don’t care about this. Many of them don’t even allow their own family members outside. Also, we shouldn’t respect women because they are sisters or mothers, but because they are human. We must emphasis our common humanity.

Instead of belittling the problem or telling women to dress differently, if you want to do something to stop harassment as a man in our country do the following five things.

1: Start from yourself and recognize that no one has the right comment or harass women based on their clothing.

2: If someone is harassing a girl or a woman don’t be a silent bystander.

3: Use your words and show with your actions that harassment is not something you will accept or ignore.

4: If women are having a problem with men in public, don’t automatically assume they need your help. They might not feel safe getting your help. They might be afraid of creating a fight.  Don’t immediately act like a hero and start hitting people. Ask the women if they need help. If they said, “no.” Respect that. You don’t want to make things worse.

5: Using social media and other media to advocate against street harassment. Every man can campaign to change the views of other men. This will create a ripple effect.

By Mustafa Raheel, Dukhtarane Rabia (Daughters of Rabia): A blog on social justice in Afghanistan

Poster text: The cause of street harassment is not in the way women dress, but in the way some men think. 

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Afghanistan: Invisible Wounds

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Guest Blog Post for International Anti-Street Harassment Week 2015

All women have the right to exit their homes without fear. Nothing justifies street harassment.

Being harassed in public is a type of humiliation most women are familiar with. Many have felt the weight of its trauma on their shoulders every day. All the while, the majority of men are unaware of the social, mental and physical impact of street harassment on women.

For many, being harassed is so belittling that they don’t dare talk about it fearing being blamed for it. Many women in Afghanistan don’t speak because they are afraid they will lose the few freedoms they have if they admit to the existence of this issue. This is not a rare occurrence.

Here, in Afghanistan, especially in big cities, the vast majority of women face verbal and physical harassment. No group of women- old, young, hejabed, non-hejabed, burqa-wearing, student, teenaged- are spared. Few women don’t carry the invisible wounds of trauma that harassment has inflicted upon them.

I too am one of the millions of women around the world who has had scary experiences with harassment. They hurt my spirit and torture me and I can’t forget them.

One of the freshest wounds is from a few days ago. A friend and I were walking home from the university and busy discussing our lessons. We were so warmed up that, unlike usual, we did not notice the lustful looks and comments of the men around us.

Suddenly, someone forcefully hit my friend’s leg. She screamed and hit the attacker with her books. We realized he was an old man. We were both shocked and scared. My entire body was shaking. I didn’t know what to say. My friend’s screaming gathered a crowd around us. She was angry, shaking and cursing. I held her hand and pulled her away from the crowd. One of the men had begun hitting the man who touched my friend.

Startled, we had forgotten what we were talking about. We were close to bursting into tears for being belittled publicly. I felt tiny. My friend looked at me and said, “This is Afghanistan. You can’t expect more than this.”

I didn’t know where to dump the flood of pain I felt as a woman who has been denied the bare minimum safety to go to school. How could I become a shoulder for my friend and relief her pain? I looked ahead and stared at the cloud that was swallowing the sun. I held my friend’s hand harder. We walked home in silence with the weight of hatred pulling us to the ground.

I felt terrible. All night I thought about what happened. The more I thought, the more it made me sick to my stomach because this wasn’t the first time I had witnessed, experienced or heard about street harassment.

One after another, my experiences populated by mind. I remembered every detail. I could not forget.

Deh Afghanan Bazaar, crowded streets and the man who had forcefully pushed his body against a young girl’s and then ran away. The girl had run behind him, screaming, cursing.

I had just hit puberty. I did not understand all this, but slowly I had begun to hear words of caution from older girls at school.

“When you go to bazaar walk when one hand in front of you and another in the back so that no one can touch you,” they said. I had gotten confused and terrified. Until I finished school, I had been fearful of crowded spaces and tried to avoid them.

I remember my friend’s tearful eyes who told me of the fear she felt when a man on a motorcycle had stopped her and pulled her scarf away from her head. She was swallowing her tears as she spoke.

I know a taxi driver who tried to abduct a female university student and drove through a crowded street full of cars.

I remember the day one of my female students came to class angry. She hit her books against the desk and cursed “all those who can’t shut their mouths.” She had asked her harassers if they didn’t have mothers or sisters of their own that they were harassing someone else’s sister and mother. They had told her they had mothers and sisters. Not wives.

Her pride was hurt, but perhaps in this world pride is a privilege we only allow for men.

I cannot forget the faces, whistles and words of my fellow university classmates at the academic setting of the university, where we are all supposed to be safe.

I cannot forget these memories. Many people don’t know that it is not just suicide attacks that cause mental issues in our societies. Lack of security, fear that someone will touch and violate your body, or verbally harass you can also cause you mental unrest and pain.

….but forgetting these stories is the only option. In this world, where many fathers don’t see their daughters as humans and brothers their sisters, what can one expect of strangers.

Poster text: All women have the right to exit their homes without fear. Nothing justifies street harassment. 

Wahida Mehrpoor, Dukhtarane Rabia (Daughters of Rabia): A blog on social justice in Afghanistan

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Street Harassment Workshops in Kabul

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One of SSH’s Safe Public Spaces Mentoring pilot sites is in Kabul, Afghanistan, where college-age young adults led workshops on street harassment in several high schools. Their project is nearly complete. This is an excerpt from a report that was recently submitted by project co-leads Masooma Maqsoodi and Zeinab Noori.

“If we claim walking in Kabul’s street is a daily mental torture for Afghan women and girls we have not exaggerated. Streets in Afghanistan are men’s territory and they consider it their right to harass these “second class creatures” who have dared to find their place in the territory. Even a 6-years-old boy who is playing in the side walk or in front of a house thinks if he can make fun of a female passerby by verbal harassment, he has scored another point to toward gaining masculinity and becoming “another man” dominating the streets and public spaces of his country.

Almost all Afghan women experience various forms of street harassment every day in their life, but it’s not just a daily experience to be forgotten a few seconds later; it leaves long lasting scars on women’s spirit and sense of confidence which discourages and limits women’s participation in public life. However, due to the predominant culture of “shame” and “honor” and high social stigma attached to issues of sexual harassment, Afghan women often do not talk about their experiences of street harassment. The scar remains invisible and women continue to suffer, generation after generation.

We, ourselves, have been constantly victims and witnesses of street harassment back home. We strongly feel there is great need for public education about women’s right to safe public spaces and social respect and acknowledgment of this right. There were few activities in the last two years to raise awareness about and to combat street harassment in Afghanistan, mostly done by women activists and members of Young Women for Change. These activities included conducting rallies, debates, talk shows, movie screening, poster distribution, and collecting data about street harassment.

We, however, for several reasons wanted to approach a specific group of audience: teenagers and high school students, mostly male students. The first reason was that we wanted to start the discussion about street harassment at schools, where students had never had such kind of programs conducted for them. In addition we wanted to create a bridge among male and female students by helping them exchange messages and ideas through us in order to give them a deeper understanding of the issue. We wanted to hear their opinions and see how these young people think about street harassment and what solutions they offer.

As part of the Stop Street Harassment Safe Public Spaces Mentoring Program we started with a a series of workshops at Star Educational Society, a private coed language academy in west of Kabul. Mostly girls showed up for the first session on 30th July, as we expected (this issue is not of interest to most men in Afghanistan). We had around 30 participants, 8 of whom were male.

The first session in all of our workshops was designed to be an introductory session with Afghan women narratives about street harassment, especially Noorjahan Akbar’s “A Letter to My Harasser” and “The Pathway of Agony” by Fatima Hussaini. It was for the first time that women’s stories about street harassment were read to most of the students. The narratives could literally grab the attention of all the students. We could see profound empathy in the faces of all female and some male audiences. These narratives talked about women’s daily struggle with all kind of harassment. One of the narratives highlighted deprivation of Afghan women from doing natural activities, such as running or laughing on the streets, activities that women are not supposed to do in public spaces only because of the strong and well established traditional, cultural and religious norms that expect women to avoid any kind of behavior that might attract men’s attention toward them.

After reading the narratives we handed the participants some worksheets including some handouts about different ways to help stop public sexual harassment, a questionnaire and a listener’s guide so that the audience learn how they are expected to approach female members of their families and ask them about their experiences about street harassment. The interview activity was designed to encourage boys to listen to women, who live in the same society, but they have never been listened to. We thought it makes more sense for the male participants when they get to know that street harassment happens to women in their families too. Afghan women usually do not share their experiences with male members of their families because they know women are the ones to be blamed for it first. “There must have been something provocative about your dressing or attitude” is what most of whom will hear.

After explaining the assignment to the participants, we had the handicraft activity as an ice breaker and fun part of the program. Participants were instructed to paint papers with water color and write their messages about street harassment, which most participants enjoyed doing it.

During the second session, we showed some documentaries made by Afghan filmmakers in addition to some TV reports and a talk show about street harassment, all in Dari. The challenging part started after presenting the documentaries, when students were encouraged and given the opportunity to have a discussion on the issue and express their opinions freely. Both at Star and in public schools the teachers and other administrative staffs were sent out of the room for creating a more open and comfortable space for students to talk.

Our male colleague, Ali Shahidi, helped us organize and lead the discussion session at Star. The discussion boomed after two of the male participants said they thought women were responsible for attracting and provoking men sexually. One of them complained about one of his classmates talking to male strangers and exchanging contact numbers with them. The other one stated that according to Islam women were only expected to have makeup for their husbands and those women who did not have Islamic dressing were inviting harassment themselves and should not complain. Female participants responded to them firmly that in most cases women were not in any way to be blamed for being harassed. We also had male participants who strongly disagreed with blaming women for street harassment.

There was a participant wearing a long dress, dark scarf and no makeup. She stood up to show her dressing to other participants and said harassment has nothing to do with women’s way of dressing or behavior. She said she had never done anything to attract men’s attention but had always been harassed on her way to university. She also believed that confronting the harassers had not worked for her; they had continued their harassment for they knew there were no consequences, nor by the law enforcement, neither by the public. She asked the male participants, calling them brothers, to help their sisters fight against street harassment. Female participants expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to talk and to be heard and told us they strongly felt empowered and encouraged to continue talking about the issue with others after the workshop.  

During the third session at Star, volunteers who wanted to conduct similar workshops at their communities received a training kit including workshop materials, handouts, and necessary instructions. And we are looking forward to receive their reports, photos and news about their follow-up activities.

The second part of the project was (sponsored by Women in Public Service Project) was held in four public high schools in different parts of Kabul. At each workshop there were more than 40 students showed up and most of them had active participation….

Overall:

Many students found the program interesting, informative, and productive. They believed that the problem of street harassment could not be solved with short term programs and requested us to continue it in the future, and to provide spaces for discussions with the presence of both male and female participants. They suggested having media (TV) coverage for the program to spread the message to the rest of the society and engage more people in the discussions.

Even we could not change the mindset of many male students about street harassment, we made them think about the issue for the first time. We read narratives for them that they had never heard about. We brought them messages from female students of their age who politely asked them to respect women on the streets. For the first time, we made them listen to voices of Afghan women who have been harassed everyday on the same streets Afghan men were walking freely and comfortably. We were shocked by the radical ideas of many of the students about women’s freedom and rights to safe public spaces, but at the same time we were supported and encouraged to by some others to raise awareness and shed lights on the agony of Afghan women. Our time was limited but we feel we had a significant impact on our audience. We are happy to have had the support of many male colleagues and friends at Star Educational Society and Abdul Rahim Shahid high school.

We know we have started a journey during which we will face more and more obstacles, but we will never stop as long as Afghan women are not treated with dignity and respect in streets and public spaces of Afghanistan.”

I applaud these young women and man for bringing the issue of street harassment to high schools and for reaching so many youth!

The people who received training to do the workshops are conducting them this month, so stay tuned for another report.

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