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USA: How the #MeToo Movement Can Help End Gender Norms

March 25, 2018 By Correspondent

Connie DiSanto, USA SSH Blog Correspondent

Stop Street Harassment’s, recent national report found that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime. While this statistic is unfortunately not surprising, the study also found that 43% of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime. We know that numbers are overwhelming higher for women and girls who have experienced sexual harassment and assault, but the numbers for men and boys are in themselves, alarming too. And the #MeToo movement is continuing to reveal the enormity of this epidemic.

It’s been said that colleges could have predicted the #MeToo movement. Working at a college based crisis center, my colleagues and I already know that sexual assault and harassment occur at high rates on campuses across the nation. The #MeToo movement has sparked new energy into the work that continues to be done on campuses every day to protect survivors of sexual violence.

Working with one of our student peer advocates, we decided to give our community (students, faculty and staff) a chance to be in the #MeToo movement by offering them participation in a photo essay exhibit to be displayed during International Anti-Street Awareness Week. I asked a student assistant of ours if he wanted to participate in our #MeToo exhibit. He has been working with our program for over three years now, first as a trained peer advocate and then as our student direct services assistant. In the latter role, he is responsible for managing our fleet of trained students who work our 24/7 crisis hotline. We are fortunate to have both female and male students working with us to help end violence on our campus.

He told me that he wanted to help support the exhibit but he didn’t realize that I was asking if he wanted to participate in the exhibit. I could see from the look on his face that he was confused and wondering why I thought he could participate. I explained that the movement was for anyone who has been impacted by sexual assault or harassment. He understood but was still not seeing himself actually in it, rather as someone looking in from the outside. We talked a bit more and he was able to recall an incident that happened to him, however, he felt it probably ‘didn’t count’ and that it wasn’t a big deal. I asked him to play out the incident with the genders reversed. He immediately thought it would be wrong if a male student had said the same thing that was said to him, to a female student. I pointed out to him that it was wrong for a female student to say those things to him too. Sexual harassment is wrong, regardless of gender.

Rape culture, particularly on a college campus, emphasizes the myth that “guys can’t get raped” and boys learn at an early age that they are supposed to want to have sex with girls (and women in some cases), even when they don’t. Some boys and men don’t even realize when they have been sexually harassed or assaulted. Boys are taught the concept of masculinity which feed into ideas of what it means to be a man; that they should not show emotions, should not be sensitive and they should be dominant, especially over girls. And as boys grow into men, male gender norms can cement these toxic ideas of what a man should be.

Traditional gender norms are a social construct and are damaging to everyone, but we as a society can change them.

Connie is the Marketing Communications Specialist for the Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP) at the University of New Hampshire.

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Filed Under: correspondents Tagged With: boys, campuses, men, metoo

#16Days of Activism: Creative Youth Projects (Day 14)

December 8, 2015 By HKearl

Nov. 25 – Dec. 10 are the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. To commemorate the week, we are featuring 1 activism idea per day. This information is excerpted from my new book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World (Praeger 2015).

Whether it’s by making art or a video or organizing a march, youth from Azerbaijan to the United States are undertaking creative ways to address street harassment.

beagentleman“What do you get when you annoy girls? They just think you are a bad person,” “You shouldn’t do it, bro,” and “Be a good man,” six teenage boys tell their peers in a mixture of Azerbaijani and English in a 2012 YouTube video. Jake Winn, an American youth development Peace Corps volunteer was in Azerbaijan, from 2010 to 2012 and had daily interaction with many young boys and men. He told me he noticed that “street harassment was a learned behavior and most were sincerely ignorant to the dangers and problems with street harassment.”

When he brought it up with them, there was little resistance to the idea that it needed to stop. It was just something they had never thought about. And for the boys and men who did think there was something wrong, he said, “they didn’t know how to bring it up, how to resist, how to convey a message to their peers that it wasn’t OK.”

After Winn showed the youth an American video of men telling other men to stop harassing women, the boys decided to make their own. “They wrote it, filmed it, edited it. … They loved making the video and were proud to show it,” Winn said. “Few had ever taken the time to think and reflect. It was great to see how inspired girls were to realize how many allies they had among the young men.”

To date, it has been viewed more than 6,000 times, and it received a standing ovation when it was shown at a youth film festival in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. Winn also developed a lesson plan and discussion questions for other Peace Corps volunteers to use with their own students, and more than a dozen volunteers did so. The materials are available on the SSH website in both Azerbaijani and English.

2014 Hey Baby art in Tucson
2014 Hey Baby art in Tucson (Abril is two in from the left)

Hey Baby | Art Against Sexual Violence launched in Tucson, Arizona, through the Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault in 2009. Inspired by an art-centric Hey Baby project in North Carolina, up to 50 students and 30 adults participate in the Tucson initiative each spring. Their artwork addresses themes of prevention and support for survivors of homophobia, street harassment, relationship abuse, rape, and child sexual abuse.

While the program is currently evolving, in the past, the art has been displayed in public libraries across Tucson during Sexual Assault Awareness Month and online. “I think it is important for youth to engage with troubling social issues in a context where they have control over the processes used to solve that problem,” the program’s manager (and SSH board member) Manuel Abril told me. “This means that instead of making youth [feel they] have to identify with social issues (social systems dispense blame for social problems affecting them onto marginalized communities) they are able to investigate it, to unravel it aesthetically, and to give it back to society.”

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Filed Under: 16 days, male perspective, public harassment, Resources, street harassment Tagged With: arizona, Azerbaijan, boys, hey baby art, youth

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