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#16Days of Activism: Patrolling (Day 8)

December 2, 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).

At various times and places, a spate of well-publicized attacks on women in public spaces has inspired people to set up patrols or volunteer escort services. In recent years, this happened in Norway, the United States, and Egypt.

In 2011, after reading about men raping several young women who were walking home at night in Oslo, Norway, four young women in their early 20s formed Action Against Rape (AAR) and decided they would patrol the city after dark to help make the environment safer. The first weekend they went out, around 200 people joined them. During the next year, AAR organized patrol groups of 4–6 people every Friday and Saturday night from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Wearing yellow vests, they fanned out across the city. They rarely encountered harassers, but AAR co-founder Lisa Arntzen felt their very presence deterred harassment and violence. “I was 21 and didn’t have the power to make the big changes, so this was something easy I could do,” Arntzen told me. “That’s why so many people joined us. They realized they could contribute and it wasn’t hard at all.”

Similarly, in response to numerous sexual assaults of women in Brooklyn, New York, American bike messenger Jay Ruiz reacted by starting the Brooklyn Bike Patrol in 2011. He recruited 10 volunteers, and they began escorting women home from five neighborhood subway stops from 8 p.m. until midnight most nights. People could simply call them to request an escort. Within weeks, they expanded their volunteer base and service area. Wearing florescent-yellow T-shirts, the volunteers continue to receive up to a dozen calls each night.

Because many men in Egypt take advantage of crowds at protests and holidays to harass, grope, and commit gang assaults against women, activism groups set up patrols during these times in 2012. Wearing bright-yellow vests, they look for harassment situations and break them up. They also publicize a phone number people can call if they need help. For example, in 2012 during Eid-ul-Fitr, the holiday at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, volunteers with Bassma (Imprint) interrupted many instances of harassment and helped police arrest several harassers each day. Founder Nihal Zaghloul wrote for the SSH blog, “It is OUR RIGHT as women to walk in the streets safely, and [since] NO ONE will give us this right, we must take it ourselves.”

Similarly, during political protests, as many as 300 volunteers with groups like Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment wear shirts proclaiming Tahrir Square a “safe square for all” while standing at every checkpoint, atop watchtowers, and throughout the crowd. They pass out hotline numbers and instructions on handling rape trauma victims. After one of their patrols in December 2012, Yasmine Abdelhamid said it was the first time since the uprising that she felt it was safe for her to protest in Tahrir Square.

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#16Days of Activism: Painting Murals (Day 5)

November 29, 2015 By HKearl

Painting murals and spray-painting graffiti against street harassment is a type of political art and communication that has been used in many cultures since ancient times.

*Circle of Hell mural in Egypt. Via the Art Newspaper*

During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, graffiti art and murals were used to voice political opinions. Some women used these to speak out against the sexual harassment and violence many women protesters faced. Artist El Zeft nad Mira Shihadeh, for example, painted a mural called Circle of Hell depicting dozens of leering men surrounding one woman like a pack of wolves surrounding its prey.

One graffiti stencil from that time period was a blue bra accompanied by the caption “No to the stripping of people” and below it was the outline of a foot that said, “Long live the revolution.” It references a 2011 videotaped beating of a female protester by police during which all of her clothes were stripped off, which revealed her blue bra. Some messages were defiant. One graffiti stencil created by Hend Kheera featured a woman with the caption, “Warning! Don’t touch or castration awaits you!” A stencil created by Mira Shihadeh (featured on the book’s cover) showed a woman standing tall and holding a spray can to spray away tiny men. The caption read “No to sexual harassment.”

Egyptian anti-street harassment activists with the group HarassMap have also used graffiti to bring attention to sexual harassment in public spaces. In 2013, for example, a team of mostly male volunteers in Giza wrote messages on walls like “Be a man; protect her from harassment instead of harassing her” and “No to harassment” while a team in Alexandria covered up sexist graffiti that promoted violent harassment by painting a mural that said, “LOVE.”

Anti-street harassment activists in Nepal and the United States painted murals in 2014. In Kathmandu, ten young women and men from the group Astitwa painted a huge mural with a street, a “stop” hand and their logo. The main message in green block lettering was “We Are against Street Harassment,” and each person placed her or his hands in red paint and added their hand-print below it.

On their U.S. mural, People’s Justice League (formerly Hollaback! Appalachian Ohio) wrote the messages “Bobcats against cat-calls” and “YOU have the power to end street harassment” (with their logo) and drew a map of uptown Athens with red and green dots showing where people had reported being harassed (red) and where they reported intervening in harassment situations (green).

Help fund our work in 2016, donate to our end-of-year giving campaign!

Egypt: Comic Stories Against Harassment

October 29, 2015 By HKearl

Our friends at Imprint Movement, in collaboration with Al-Moltqa for Consulting and Training, launched a new anti-harassment campaign in Cario’s subways yesterday.

Their press release says:

“The campaign aims aims to communicate to subway passengers and security personnel how sexual harassment affects the entire Egyptian society and not only the girl or the woman who gets sexually harassed.

Imprint has chosen a new approach to draw attention, “Comic Stories”. The comic stories address the challenges that women face created by sexual harassment, the victim blaming culture, to what extend do women and girls feel safe in public space, reactions of the public, its reflection on her personal and professional life and how that effects the entire society. Many posters will be put up to show how the crime of sexual harassment increases when the public don’t interfere to support the girl/woman who get sexually harassed.

The comic story will be circulating around the Cairo subway, It’s Now at Al-Shohadaa, Then it will take place at Mohamed Naguib then Al-Sadat and finally Al-Attaba metro stations. Twelve posters will be put up at Helwan University station, Manshyet Al Sadr Station and Cairo university station as these station are considered to have the most activity and gets huge amount of people daily.

The launching of “What will you do?” campaign is 24th of October, 2015 and ends on the 15th of February 2016.”

Congratulations to them on this innovative campaign!

Learn more about the campaign and see photos here.

Via the Guardian: An illustration depicting a young woman’s experience on a minibus. Illustration: Ahmed Nahby/Mada Masr/Imprint

UPDATE: The Guardian has a great feature article about their campaign. Here is an excerpt:

“Imprint, the organisation behind the campaign, has been raising awareness of sexual harassment through events ranging from one-on-one conversations to workshops, co-founder Abdel Fattah al-Sharkawy explained.

He said participants – both male and female – often found they weren’t aware of what constitutes sexual harassment, and rarely related the term to their own day-to-day experiences.

‘We wanted to make that link’ through the comic campaign, he said.

The group decided to work with comics because ‘they’re catchy and colourful’, drawing people of all ages in to explore the stories they tell, Sharkawy added.

Another image from the series shows male passengers on a minibus reacting to the young woman.

‘This woman can be an influential person in your life,’ the illustration reads. ‘Sexual harassment doesn’t harm her alone, it harms us all.’

They differ from typical public service announcements because they rely on storytelling instead of propagandistic slogans, so they ‘make you think and form an opinion,’ he said.”

New HarassMap Campaign: ‘Harasser = Criminal’

May 23, 2015 By HKearl

From our friend HarassMap in Egypt:

“Our campaign ‘Harasser = Criminal’ (El Mota7aresh Mogrim) is live!

It is a campaign to motivate people to take action and stand up to sexual harassment when they see it happen, so that we can start building a society where sexual harassment is not tolerated and harassers do not get away with their crime.

We launched with a press conference on Thursday May 21 at the Goethe Institute in downtown Cairo. The launch was covered by MBCMasr, Mada Masr, Youm 7, and others. Check out our video from the press conference here.

The campaign is now running online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Over the next week it will roll out on the streets in Cairo and other governorates around Egypt.

TV and radio ads will be aired on MBC Masr, CBC, El Nahar, Dream 2, and Radio Masr. Find the directors cut versions of the campaign ads here:

You can find more written information about the campaign on our website.”

Cairo: We Will Ride Bicycles!

October 12, 2013 By HKearl

In Egypt, there is a new campaign called, “We Will Ride Bicycles,” intended to confront street harassment. Today was their first event and women and their male allies rode bicycles around Cairo!

Via allAfrica.com:

“Riding a bicycle and feeling the breeze of the air is one of our simplest dreams,” said the campaign’s event page, adding that all women should be allowed to freely ride bicycles without being harassed or judged.

The activists behind the campaign said they chose the theme of riding bicycles to promote women and girl’s rights to run errands through cycling without being afraid of attracting negative reaction in the streets.

Scheduled for Saturday, the event’s assembly point will be outside October War Panorama on Saleh Salem Street and its end point will be at Azhar Park.

“The campaign’s main objective is confronting the unjustified rejection of the community concerning females riding bicycles,” said Michael Nazeh, one of the founders of the campaign.”

What a great idea! If you’re in Washington, D.C., there will be a similar event next Saturday, Oct. 19, benefiting our friends Collective Action for Safe Spaces! Info/RSVP.

We Will Ride Bicycles Event — Oct. 12, 2013, Cairo, Egypt

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