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#CarnivalSemAssedio Campaign in Brazil

February 9, 2016 By HKearl

CarnavalSemAssedio‬ campaign in brazil, feb 2016Via Telesur TV:

“A campaign against street harassment during Carnival is gathering steam in Brazil.

The campaign is using the hashtag ‪#‎CarnavalSemAssedio‬, or ‪#‎CarnivalWithoutHarassment‬, to help dispel the myth that harassment during Carnival is somehow more permissible.
“Unfortunately, sexual abuse figures increase in this period for many reasons and many men justify their abusive behavior as a normal attempt to ‘flirt’,” Heloisa Aun, one of the campaign’s founders, told Forum magazine.

According to the campaign’s materials, the goal is to “combat violence and machismo, promoting discussion that harassment is harassment no matter the time of year.”

Organizers are calling on women and men to break the silence and speak out against harassment during carnival, using the hashtag to document cases of harassment.”

Good for them!

I’m wishing all who celebrate it a safe & fun Carnival and Mardi Gras!

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Filed Under: Activist Interviews, News stories Tagged With: brazil, Carnival, festival, street harassment

Five Country Study on Women’s Safety in Cities

December 20, 2011 By HKearl

Nepali Women conduct a safety walk

“I carry safety pins with me while travelling. Whenever I feel that I am being harassed by someone around me, I poke him with my safety pin. It alerts the person who is conducting such violence on me. I was taught to do it by seniors in my college. I was hesitant to do it at first, but I found that when my friends did it, the person who harasses tends to back off. So that gave me confidence to use it by myself as well. .. ” – A college student in Nepal

“A woman I know felt safe in this community because of the [gangsters/traffickers] who took care of the community, who watched over everything that happened. But that only gives you security when they don’t have their eye on you [i.e., want to date you]…the man who watched over the entrance to the community one day decided he wanted to go out with her, and he told her to go get dressed up to go out the next day at 7 p.m. If she didn’t go out with him, he was going to kill her children and husband. She didn’t have a choice.” – A woman in Brazil

“When we [are] leaving factory, there are crowd[s] and gangsters often come to touch women’s bottoms and they laugh and feel it’s normal. There have also been instances where workers were sexually assaulted by gangsters during daylight hours.” – A garment factory worker in Cambodia

How safe are public places for women who work in factories in Cambodia, for university students in Liberia, for street vendors in Ethiopia, for women commuters in Nepal, and for women in Brazil?

The NGO ActionAid conducted a participatory study to find out the answer. Through using safety audits, focus groups, and mapping, groups of women discussed and showed what about their cities make them feel insecure. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of reasons why they felt unsafe, including personal experiences of harassment or assault, wariness of local drug traffickers, and poorly lit roads.

The findings from the study and the recommendations for making cities safer for women are available in the fascinating report Women and the City: Examining the gender impact of violence and urbanisation.

I highly recommend reading the report as it provides an in-depth slice of information about five demographics of women in five different countries and because the study was conducted and written in such a way that the women were able to share their stories and speak for themselves.

Through email correspondences, the report author Alice Taylor told me why she thinks the study is important:

“I think it’s crucial to look at issues of how cities are developed and are growing — in ways that are equal and unequal to their citizens — and violence against women together, to see how different kinds of risk factors intersect to influence women’s lives.”

She also spoke to its challenges:

“It was challenging to analyze and bring together such different contexts and approaches into one report, but it demonstrated how prevalent forms of insecurity are for women across urban settings.”

And she shared three findings that stuck out to her the most from her process of writing the report:

“First, the ways in which women constantly have to calculate and avoid routes in their own cities – that was universal.

Second, the finding about the popularity of mapping, which I think holds a lot of promise as a community-based and participatory approach as well as a powerful advocacy tool.

Third, I think there’s a lot to develop in the future in terms of ethics and “do no harm” when doing research on women’s urban safety, as well as monitoring and evaluation to understand what works.

After the five country profiles, the report concludes with six recommendations for making cities safer for women (starting on page 61):

1.      Raise awareness of the problem

2.      Build government commitment

3.      Change social norms for prevention

4.      Build institutional capacity to address the problem

5.      Strengthen networks for advocacy

6.      Conduct research for evidence-based programmes and policies.

Their recommendations aligned closely with the ones I wrote in my book (e.g. raising awareness, changing social norms, and conducting research).

In conclusion, Taylor offers her thoughts on where further research is necessary:

“I think a big question out there, is to further articulate gender analysis around urban safety: which types urban violence/ insecurity are particularly dangerous for women (i.e., poor men experience higher murder rates and are also greatly affected by poverty), why, and what interventions can be designed.”

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Filed Under: News stories, Stories, street harassment Tagged With: ActionAid, Alice Taylor, brazil, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nepal, report, street harassment

“You are delicious”

December 1, 2010 By Contributor

I always, I mean always witnessed men saying, “You are delicious”, “I want to lick you pussy”, with me and my sister, and every female. A few times I was touched, so was my sister.

– KS

Location: City: Goiania, State: Goias, Country: Brazil

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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Filed Under: Stories, street harassment Tagged With: brazil, sexual harassment, street harassment, you are delicious

The real immoral crimes

November 10, 2009 By HKearl

Ugh, here’s a story with classic victim blaming based on clothing…

AP image of the student in her dress

In Sao Bernando do Campo, Brazil, administrators at a university expelled a 20 year old student for wearing a short dress to class and allegedly acting immorally by doing things like taking the long way to class to increase the number of students who would see her. Hundreds of students heckled and catcalled her. Super outrageously, the university (after expelling her) paid for newspapers ads to publicly shame her and accuse her of immorality.

Of course various places have dress codes, which if justified, should be respected, but there is no indication that she violated a dress code. It sounds like the university officials just did not like her  and the student responses to her dress.

The student has been speaking out against this treatment saying, “It’s a great injustice. I always dressed in a way that makes me feel good and that doesn’t offend anybody. I was always like that and was never recriminated by anybody.”

Since the media caught wind of it (in part because of a youtube video), the university has since conceded to let her return to school, with a police escort. Good. Now civil police in the city are going to investigate the students accused of heckling her. The university said it would temporarily suspend some of them. Good. Sexual harassment is socialized, learned behavior that should not be tolerated.

And the accusations of immorality? Come on… get real. It’s convenient that their type of immorality is something only women can be accused of. Next thing you know they’ll want women to wear burlap sacks over their heads or to be banned from school altogether because they could probably construe being a woman and having female body parts as being immoral…

I’m sure there are plenty of child molesters and rapists and street harassers on campus and in their town (and maybe among their faculty) that they could spend their ad money on to shame rather than on a 20-year-old student who wore a short dress to class…!!  Those are the real crimes of immorality!!

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Filed Under: News stories Tagged With: brazil, expelled for short skirt, sao bernando do campo, sexual harassment, short skirt, victim blaming

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