When was the first time you were sexually harassed in a public space?
This question always has been hard for me to answer.
I have had so many experiences over the years that I usually say I am unsure of my first verbal sexual harassment experience, though I remember the first time I was followed: I was 14 years old, running a few miles from my home in southern California.
But now I have the answer.
My parents kept weekly journals for me and my sisters and what we did that week. Their entries and my childhood artwork fill binders that line a closet in my house. Recently I was digging through some of these binders.
In one I learned that the first time I was harassed in a public space, I was five years old, two months after this first-day-of-school photo was taken:
At this time, my family and I lived only a few blocks from my elementary school in Iowa City, Iowa. A boy next door was my age and we often walked to school together. From that time period, I have had a vague memory of being scared of older boys and my friend Aaron running away.
In the journal, I read more details. My parents wrote (using first person, as if they were me) about how these older boys “scared me today and I began to cry. They said they wanted to give me candy and they wanted me to come to their house after school. They pinched my cheeks. Aaron ran off but fortunately Martha’s dad [Martha was another neighborhood friend] happened by right then and helped me to school.
We [my parents and I] talked for a long time about this and what to do next time and how boys shouldn’t touch girls. This has been scary for me.”
It’s almost laughable that these boys offered me candy, the stereotypical “stranger danger” strategy that adults warn kids about. But what does not make me laugh and makes me really angry is that they tried to lure me to their house and they actually touched me, pinching my cheeks.
I am grateful to my friend’s dad for intervening and that my parents talked to me about it.
But I’m also mad. I was FIVE years old, just walking to school. What right did those boys have to harass and touch me? To scare me and make me cry? They had no right, yet our culture allows it to happen, and allows them to think that it’s okay.
Too often, people dismiss street harassment as no big deal, a compliment or a minor annoyance. But how would they feel if they knew it was happening to teenagers and adolescents? Because it is.
IT STARTS YOUNG
A 2014 national survey commissioned by Stop Street Harassment (SSH) found that street harassment began by age 17 for half of harassed persons in the United States. The Brazil NGO Think Olga found that nine years old is the average age that women began facing sexual harassment. A 2010 study by the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association found that almost 90 percent of girls aged 10–18 years in Bangladesh had faced street harassment.
Stories submitted to the SSH blog describe harassment starting at ages like 7, 8, 13, and 14 years.
Recently, there’s been more attention to this issue.
A few months ago, Think Olga launched the campaign #primeiroassedio (#firstharassment) and thousands of people shared their stories. In May 2015, Twitter user Mikki Kendall invited people to tweet their first harassment experience with #FirstHarassed. Also last year, California teenager Chloe Parker started the Instagram campaign #WhatMySHSaid, encouraging teenage girls to write down the street harassment said to them, their age and location and then take a photo of it and post it.
I encourage you to join these campaigns and help bring more attention to the young age this starts.
