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16 Days – Day 6: Women Allies on a Bus

November 30, 2018 By HKearl

Each day across the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, we will highlight a 2018 activism effort undertaken to stop street harassment or a personal story about stopping harassers!

Day 6: Women Allies on a Bus

One day in California, a man followed a woman for blocks. She boarded a bus to try to get away from him, but he got on too and continued harassing her. Another woman passenger stood up and asked her, “Do you feel safe?”

The harassed woman was so upset she can’t speak, so the other passenger guided her away and said, “We can sit together.”

The harasser tried to follow them, but other women passengers then stood up to block him. Soon “there were six or seven women creating this barrier,” said one of the women who stood up. “That man looked at us, yelled one last shitty thing, and got off at the next stop. Because he realized there was no way he could win against all of us.”

This woman who stood up wrote, “After I got off the bus, I started crying. I was sad because we have to deal with situations like this ALL the time, but I was crying happy tears because, for once, I felt like I wasn’t alone, and I felt how powerful we are when we stand together.”

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Filed Under: 16 days, Stories, street harassment Tagged With: bus, bystander, california, public transit

16 Days – Day 4: A Dad Stops a Harasser

November 28, 2018 By HKearl

Each day across the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, we will highlight a 2018 activism effort undertaken to stop street harassment or a personal story about stopping harassers!

Day 4: A Dad Stops a Harasser

When a dad in California noticed a 29-year-old man start videotaping his 15-year-old daughter in a Target and crouch by another woman to take footage up her skirt, he kicked away the phone and then, when the man ran, tackled him in the parking lot. Then the dad called the police and got a photo of the man’s license plate number as he drove away. The man was later arrested for “invasion of privacy.”

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Filed Under: 16 days, male perspective, News stories, Stories, street harassment Tagged With: bystander, dad, harasser, teenager, upskirt

It’s time to embrace our voice as bystanders

April 11, 2018 By Contributor

By Julie Patrick

The #MeToo movement has been powerful – increasing visibility and giving strength to survivors while exposing behaviors that are troublesome or abusive. Too often as a society we have ignored these behaviors, excused, and normalized them while silencing survivors. We have been a part of the problem because we did not speak up – not as individuals, not as companies, not as industries or institutions. And that must stop. International Anti-Street Harassment Week is the perfect time to interrupt and challenge behaviors that are disrespectful. We can prevent harm.

It’s time to look out for each other

Understanding the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in public, private, and online spaces helps us shape prevention strategies. That’s why Raliance, a national initiative of leaders working to end sexual violence in one generation, teamed up with Stop Street Harassment to gather facts behind the #MeToo movement.

In our national study on sexual harassment and assault, we learned that 81% of women and 43% of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime. Among those, 57% of women and 42% of men said their first experience occurred by age 17. In addition to young people, women with disabilities and men in socially marginalized groups experience high levels of sexual harassment and assault. This includes Hispanic men, men with disabilities, men living below the poverty level, and gay and bisexual men — in addition to men in rural areas.

It’s time to reclaim our public spaces

Sexual harassment takes place across a range of locations, but the most frequently listed location is a public space. And we can reclaim our public spaces when we all embrace our voice. We know that young people and socially marginalized folks are experiencing sexual harassment in public spaces most frequently. Our findings show us that sexual harassment and assault are abuses of power, disrespect, and disregard for human dignity. When we look out for each other, we challenge these behaviors and their root causes. One of the core values we can all share is the dignity of all people.

You can be a good bystander by showing up

Remember that your age, race, or gender may make it safer for you to speak up and act. When you witness a concerning situation, you can disrupt it. Remember every situation is different, and there are many ways you can respond. Disruptions and interruptions can be as simple as asking the harasser for directions or striking up a conversation with the person being harassed. If you don’t feel safe, contact the police or involve people around you to help. When you hear something, say something – being direct and honest that these comments or actions are not acceptable reinforces that they won’t be tolerated. You can tell someone their “joke” isn’t funny.

This is also important in our online interactions. Sexual harassment and assault are never the survivor’s fault. That’s why it’s important to believe and support survivors. Reinforcing these messages online when you see concerning posts helps shift the accountability from the person experiencing the harassment or abuse to the person who committed the abuse.

We are in this together!

Enforcing the behaviors we want to see will help us create a safer world. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect; no one should experience sexual harassment or assault. You can Embrace Your Voice this April as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month! Learn more tips for being a good bystander!

Julie Patrick is the National Partners Liaison for Raliance and a staff member at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Prior to this, Julie worked for over a decade in the Family Advocacy Division at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

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Filed Under: anti-street harassment week, Resources, street harassment Tagged With: bystander, SAAM, Sexual Assault Awareness Month

USA: A Case to Bring Bystander Interventionism and Anti-Harassment Education into Primary Schools

January 30, 2018 By Correspondent

Patrick Hogan, Chicago, IL, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Credit: Brian Evans, Flickr

Harassment is not an uncommon occurrence, but it is often a taboo subject to address. Now, in the wake of the popularization of the #MeToo movement, it is time harassment is discussed openly. The obvious first question: How should we as a society deal with it?

Many activists think the most efficient way to fight street harassment is via culture change—to teach students, as young as primary school students, to dispel negative gender stereotypes and to be active bystanders in harassment situations.

Street harassment is largely ignored as a societal issue though, despite 65 percent of women and 25 percent of men in the United States having been harassed in public streets, according to a SSH-commissioned report. The same report found that 10 percent of victims were harassed by 12 years of age. Most legislative attempts made to stem the frequency of street harassment fall short of their goal: they consist of vague laws and statutes that are difficult to enforce. Harassment on public streets has become just something that happens—if this is the attitude we accept than street harassment will be ignored, left as a societal vice we must learn to live with.

Learning to live with street harassment has been the predominant educational initiative. That is, when discussing harassment with our children, we tend to teach them to be vigilant, how to dress, defensive measures, and how to behave in public so as not to be harassed. These are reactive measures; we assume harassment is an inevitability, so we teach methods of avoiding it, hoping a harasser will find a different person to victimize. While it is most certainly important to teach our children to be aware of their surroundings and how to protect themselves, reactive education is not going to end street harassment. We need proactive solutions: education that teaches not to accept harassment as an unfortunate reality of civil society.

Harassment should not be a taboo issue. If 10 percent of harassment victims were harassed by the age of 12, then educational initiatives should be enacted before children reach the age of 12. Bystander intervention should be championed: it is understood that if someone witnesses a bullying incident and does not interve, that person is siding with the bully. However, if that person intervenes, the bully is shown that his/her behavior will not be tolerated and is not supported, or the victim will know he/she is not alone and the aforementioned behavior is not appreciated.  The same applies to street harassment and gender based violence (GBV).

A report by Public Health England found evidence for bystander intervention as a productive method for combating GBV and creating a culture change on in college students. “Research evidence suggests that males who have negative gender role attitudes and who also endorse the belief that such violence is acceptable among their peers are more likely to perpetrate violence” (Fenton, et all, pg. 20). If a harasser’s own social circle refuses to tolerate harassment, the harasser is likely to stop. If harassment is not accepted as part of society then harassers (or would-be harassers) will likely refrain from harassment.

In Kenya, the nongovernmental organization Ujamaa Africa has seen phenomenal success in creating a culture change with bystander intervention. Ujamaa Africa hosts a 6-week course presented to school children called Your Moment of Truth that teaches positive masculinity, defense, and empowerment to boys and girls. The Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that Ujamaa Africa’s education program increased young boys’ intervention rate when exposed to GBV or harassment. Seventy-eight percent of the boys studied intervened when they witnessed violence and 75 percent intervened when they witnessed verbal harassment. Education-based culture change has and is working. Now we need to adapt education-based culture change into our communities and classrooms.

In Washington, D.C. City Councilmember Brianne K. Nadeau is on the forefront of the movement to change the culture surrounding street harassment with her introduction of the Street Harassment Prevention Act (SHPA) into the city council. The bill would require city employees to be trained as active bystanders to intervene in harassment-related situations, empower a committee to issue grants to initiatives to stop harassment, and would require a public awareness campaign. This is a positive step in the right direction: a campaign to create culture change and train community members to intervene.

This sort of effort should go further, to extend to the schoolhouse. Nuala Cabral of Temple University Community Collaborative (and former SSH board member) said at a Nov. 2017 roundtable discussion with a Philadelphia State Senate Committee, “We need to emphasize the importance of teaching consent. Honestly, we can start at kindergarten, we can start talking about consent. Students are hungry about this conversation and they’re not having it.”

This idea of beginning education into empowerment, toxic gender stereotypes, sexuality, harassment, and consent might seem a bit shocking to many in the U.S., but it has shown success in Ujamaa Africa’s program and is already institutionalized in every school in the Netherlands.

Preventing harassment should not merely be the responsibility of victims and potential victims. Harassment is not a merely a personal issue, it is a societal one. By creating culture change, by teaching children at a young age to dispel negative gender stereotypes and to intervene in harassment we can purge the acceptance of street harassment from our culture. Harassment is not uncommon and talking about it often seems taboo, but we can create a culture in which the opposite is reality.

Patrick is an undergraduate student majoring in anthropology and minoring in Islamic World Studies at Loyola University Chicago, preparing to continue onto law and graduate school. He is particularly interested in legal anthropology and the ways victims are viewed by legal systems.

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Filed Under: correspondents, male perspective, Resources, street harassment Tagged With: bystander, education, intervene, schools

Northern Ireland: “There’s no Excuse to be Doing Nothing”

April 13, 2017 By Correspondent

Elaine Crory, Belfast, Northern Ireland, SSH Blog Correspondent

A striking image taken in the city of Birmingham, England, went viral this week; a young woman, Saffiyah Khan, facing down a man from the far-right, xenophobic English Defense League (EDL). In the photo we can glimpse at least two EDL members, their jaws set, chins tilted up, they appear to be speaking to – or shouting at – Khan. We can also see a Police Liaison Officer, speaking to one of the EDL members. The young woman, however, is smiling serenely at the enraged man who is addressing her.

The image captured imaginations, and the story behind it is one activists can learn much from. It transpires that Khan was a bystander who stepped up to defend another woman, young British Muslim Saira Zafar, who was surrounded by EDL members, shouting at her to go back to where she came from. Both Khan and Zafar, not coincidentally, were born and raised in Birmingham. Birmingham is a large and diverse city, an industrial giant in its time, exactly the sort of place that the EDL believe is theirs, given their stated aim to whip up tensions between the Muslim population and the white population. With a smile, Khan showed them how wrong they are.

Bystander intervention is one of those things that anti-street harassment activists have been advocating for a long time. In surveys, most people who have experienced public harassment have said that they wish someone had intervened on their behalf. It doesn’t happen much, though. It’s not hard to see why in a way, sometimes it seems dangerous, sometimes we’re in a hurry, the whole thing is more trouble than it’s worth. At the most basic level, though, I suspect it’s because we are raised in a world that puts individual before community always, or that sees community as something narrow and divisive, us’uns versus them’uns, in local Belfast parlance.

But things have shifted recently. After the Brexit vote in the UK, there was an immediate increase in hate crime incidents. After Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential Election, sexist and xenophobic incidents increased, many citing Trump’s victory as evidence that “political correctness” had been defeated. One U.S. politician was arrested for grabbing a female colleague, pinching her genitals from behind, reminiscent of the president’s infamous “grab her by the pussy” comments. He did so after arguing with the woman in question and saying, “I love this new world. I no longer have to be politically correct”. The far right is on the march all across Europe, and while Geert Wilders was defeated in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen looks likely to lose the French Presidential election, the levels of support they have found is worrying, and it is spreading.

In this new world where racists, xenophobes, homophobes and misogynists feel emboldened, we can no longer stand by when people get assaulted and harassed daily on the grounds of race, gender and LGBTQ+ status. This is this generation’s great activist moment; in the words of Saffiyah Khan, interviewed along with Saira Zafar a few days after the incident, “there’s no excuse to be doing nothing”.

We must educate ourselves about intersectionality, too, and understand that oppression often thrives where identities intersect, making a woman of colour more likely to be targeted than a white woman, for instance. When we speak of bystander intervention, we often urge male allies to be aware of their power to step in and divert harassment, and to speak to their peers about the sexist attitudes that underpin street harassment. This applies to all of us; we must be aware of how and where we wield power, when our actions might have most impact. And once we have armed our minds, we must be willing to act.

Hollaback! Ottawa chalking on April 9

Hollaback! is currently hosting online webinars on bystander intervention, and you can sign up here. They have also produced useful infographics that we can learn from and share in our networks, summarising briefly the basics of bystander intervention; the 5 D’s:

  1. Direct – directly confronting or addressing harassers, as Khan did, provided it’s safe to do so
  2. Distract – get in the way, ask for directions, speak to the victim about something other than what’s happening
  3. Delegate – ask for assistance from a third party, a security guard or transport worker for instance
  4. Delay – after an incident has happened, check in with the victim, ask if they need any help, etc
  5. Document – use your phone to photograph or video what is happening, and make sure you approach the victim with your record to see if or how they want to use it

This is necessarily brief, and the tip of the iceberg. During International Anti-Street Harassment Week, activists the world over shared inventive ways of tackling the problem. The goal now must be to spread the knowledge, widen the practice, and stand up against the tide of hatred which challenges the progress we have made as a society. Psychologists have long observed the “bystander effect”, whereby the probability of a victim being helped is inversely proportional to the number of people who witness the abuse or harassment. Saffiyah Khan bucked that trend, standing up to a gang of thugs in the midst of a large crowd with nothing but a smile and the power of being on the right side of history. We can, indeed must, learn a lot from her.

Elaine is a part-time politics lecturer and a mother of two. She is director of Hollaback! Belfast, co-organises the city’s annual Reclaim the Night march, and volunteers with Belfast Feminist Network and Alliance for Choice to campaign for a broad range of women’s issues.

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Filed Under: anti-street harassment week, correspondents, News stories, Resources Tagged With: bystander

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