Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

“If you ever walk alone to your car without thinking someone might attack you, this isn’t your day.”

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International Women’s Day (the 100th anniversary, no less) is a bonanza for events, articles, and activities on women’s rights! I love it.  What a day and it’s not even 10 a.m.

At 7 a.m. today, it was chilly with a beautiful clear sky when I joined three of my AAUW coworkers and a dozen other early-risers to participate in the Washington, DC, contingency of Women for Women International‘s Meet Me on the Bridge event. While we enjoyed bagels and coffee, we gathered at the base of the Lincoln Memorial to talk about women’s rights. Then we dodged bicyclist commuters to cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge. It was inspiring to be gathered so early and to know we were part of thousands of people all over the world crossing bridges to commemorate women’s rights.

Now that I’m online, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are flooded with International Women’s  Day events, articles, and campaigns. It’s fantastic! Here are a few that stood out to me:

And here are a few of my favorite tweets!

What are you doing for International Women’s Day?

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Covered from head to toe, groping continues

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Women in Cairo. Image via the Boston Globe

I’m sick of hearing people blame women for street harassment by saying things like, “if only women covered up it wouldn’t happen.”

In many countries where women ARE completely covered, harassment occurs. 90 percent of women surveyed in 2009 in Yemen had been street harassed and most women wear a veil. Egyptian woman Hadeel al Shalchi wrote a great opinion piece for The National about the insane amount of street harassment in Egypt, and the following section discusses the issue of being covered and still being harassed:

“The onus in our society has largely lain on women to prevent sexual harassment. If a girl doesn’t cover her hair or wear very conservative clothing, then she’s obviously asking for it and wants the harassment, the prevailing attitude seemed to be.

As a result, more women began to cover up. The hijab and niqab became common in Egypt, not purely for religious reasons but also because women wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of being glared at by the opposite sex.

But when the harassment continued, Egyptian women knew there was something seriously wrong.

Covered from head to toe in black, they were still being groped, propositioned and annoyed. What more could they do? …

Three years ago, an amateur video of women in hijabs being attacked in downtown Cairo during a holiday event was made public. Shocked Egyptians were brought face to face with the ugly nature of harassment. Some mobile-phone images showed men tugging at young girls’ clothes. Others showed the girls being physically attacked.

This was real evidence of a very real problem. Those who had ignored what every woman knew could deny it no longer.

Women’s groups were emboldened to launch anti-harassment campaigns, teaching women that the problem was not their fault and encouraging them to persist in bringing complaints – even small ones – to the police. They were also urged to take self-defence classes and to use what they were taught on men who abused them in the street. …

In Egypt, sexual harassment will, most probably, continue to exist for a long time to come. Attitudes that allow such behaviour appear culturally ingrained. But increasingly women are waking up to this reality and beginning to reject it.

Women here are saying it loudly: enough to being groped on the subway, to being undressed with a look, to being followed to work. This must stop!“

Amen. Enough!! Street harassment MUST END and it will not end by requiring women to be completely hidden from view. Instead, men must stop harassing women and there must be cultural respect for women. What can you do? Here are a few ideas, feel free to share more in the comments.

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Egyptian women fight street harassment with karate

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“What should be a leisurely stroll through Cairo’s streets, for some women has become more like a gauntlet run… Campaigners say the male-dominated society leaves women feeling vulnerable and unprotected by traditional forces like the police.

Al Jazeera’s Amr el-Khaky met one group in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, who are taking the fight into their own hands: they are taking lessons in karate.” – AlJazeeraEnglish

I’ve written about street harassment in Egypt a lot across this past year. To add to the list — here’s an interesting video called “Egyptian women fight harassment” on the AlJazeerEnglish youtube channel that’s definitely worth a look. Many related videos show up after the end of the video clip if you’re interested.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb3x39Ud7cI]

 

 

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Hear from Egyptian Activists

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BBC posted a new audio report today about the rise of activism in Egypt around the widespread problem of sexual harassment in public. A few weeks ago BBC reported on the increase in women taking self defense classes in Egypt to deal with their harassers. This audio clip includes interviews with some of those women.

There is an interview with one of the women at the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights about the survey they conducted last year. This woman said that too often Egyptian women are blamed for the harassment they receive because they were supposedly dressing provocatively, and that there’s a perception that if women didn’t dress in a certain way there wouldn’t be harassment. Well, in their survey (where 83 percent of women reported experiencing harassment and 2/3rds men said they engage in harassment), more than 70 percent of the women said they were wearing a veil when they were harassed. She said that was an important finding to show how pointless it is to blame victims for harassment crimes – women are harassed no matter what they wear!

Also interviewed in the clip were individuals involved in the “Respect yourself: Egypt still has real men” campaign in a Cairo neighborhood of Mohandiseen,  sponsored by Kelmetna, a magazine for young people. It targets Egyptian men and encourages Egyptian women to speak out, too. When members of the group asked men what they would do if they saw a woman being harassed by men, most reported that they would join in harassing her, especially if she was not dressed conservatively (!!).  A young man interviewed said he thinks that since people can’t marry until they’re older due to the economy, men are taking out their sexual frustration on women in the street, causing the rise is street harassment. The group holds rallies at universities and canvasses the streets, reminding taxi drivers and food vendors to uphold Egypt’s tradition of hospitality. On Facebook, the campaign has over 53,000 members.

I also found the following about the group:

“As part of the campaign, Kelmetna magazine hosts weekly seminars and discussions to raise awareness about the problem. It also offers self-defence classes for women so they can fight off harassers. In addition to seminars, the group members and volunteers, who are all aged between 14 and 24, take their work to the streets, talking to people about sexual harassment. One of their main goals when they approach people is to convince them to refrain from all types of sexual harassment as well as to speak out when they see it happening. The campaign also involves street concerts to raise awareness.”

Fantastic work!

(thanks to frequent reader Beckie for this story tip)

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Don't Women Lose Too?

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anti-harcellement-banniere1As discussed before, a survey conducted by the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights last year found that 83 percent of Egyptian women had been street harassed and about 98 percent of foreign women reported this experience while in Egypt.

In a French newspaper The Observers, Julie Marquet, a French graduate student in history who has backpacked across dozens of European, Asian, and South American countries wrote about her experiences in Cairo. Here is an excerpt:

“I travelled to Egypt with a girlfriend of mine for two weeks in the summer of 2003. We were both 19. It’s my worst travel memory ever: Egypt is not a place you can travel to individually, especially not for two young girls!

Everywhere we went there was some hand groping us, in the street, in buses or trains… They weren’t even shy about it: they grabbed our butts, sometimes even went under our shirts! This happened even if we were careful to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants, even when it was 40°C out! We were told by Franco-Egyptian friends that women weren’t supposed to be too exuberant in public, not to laugh, not to talk loudly, not be noticeable in any way. We tried to be as discreet and invisible as possible, but that didn’t change anything.  If we lashed out angrily at them it didn’t help at all: they would just laugh and never took us seriously.”

Traveling has so many benefits, including the chance to expand one’s horizon and understanding of the human race and world, and it’s a shame women can’t have the same freedom of mobility to go to new places (or old/familiar places for that matter) as men.

Egypt is addressing the high rate of street harassment of female foreigners with a new ad, which The Observers included in their article. The video clip, “shows a typical scène of a vendor harassing a European visitor in a market. At the end, a man’s voice says: ‘If you harass visitors, you’re not the only one who loses. The whole country has to lose.'”

Hmmm. Don’t the women who are harassed lose too, if not significantly more than the men who do the harassing? Like Julie, they have lost the right to be in public without being harassed or fearing harassment even if they try to be invisible…

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