Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Call for Artists: Women and Mobility in the City Exhibition

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Artists:

How do women experience cities? How does harassment impact their mobility? JAGORI and Women in Cities International want to see your artistic depiction of these questions for their transportraits exhibition.

They’re calling for photographs (even those taken by cell phone), posters, cartoons, paintings, slogans, collages, and illustrations. Full details for the contest are found on the JAGORI website. Entries are due by October 1, 2010.

Their exhibition will be displayed at the Third International Conference on Women’s Safety: Building Inclusive Cities which is taking place in Delhi, India, Nov. 22-24, 2010. (Incidentally, I just bought my plane ticket today so I’m definitely attending!) Following the conference, the exhibition will travel to different schools and cities around India.

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Bus stop cameras in India, more on eve teasing in Bangladesh

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As of last month, all bus stops in Central Jakarta, India have sex segregated lines to curb sexual harassment and other crimes. To further curb and address the widespread problem of the sexual harassment of women waiting in line, the Transjakarta public service agency has installed closed-circuit tv’s at all bus stops. The agency is encouraging passengers to report any crime and the cameras can be monitored via the agency’s website. They’ve also started posting female officers at every bus stop. Soon there will be 54 officers at 27 stops.  It’s to see the the issue of harassment taken seriously and I hope these new measures will deter harassers.

In other news for that region of the world, AFP reports about eve teasing in Bangladesh, the spike in suicides among girls who’ve been eve teased by boys and men, why there are so many reports about eve teasing, and what needs to happen for it to end. Here’s an excerpt:

“Some girls even chose suicide as they feel so unsafe. The parents don’t listen to their daughters. Instead they accuse her of being responsible for the harassment,” she told AFP.

Even if parents do listen, they may not be able to help, with ASK evidence pointing to men who try to intervene and prevent bullying often being attacked themselves.

The father of one bullying victim committed suicide and another recently had a stroke — allegedly because he was terrified his daughter’s suicide would be reported in newspapers, ASK said.

Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation of 146 million, remains a deeply patriarchal society, and Women’s Minister Chaudhury said the balance of responsibility between the genders had to change.

“I think there is a gradual change in this, and girls are now coming out — they’re raising their voices against it and this is a good thing,” she said.

For Chaudhury, this year’s spike in reported instances of female sexual harassment or bullying is, to some extent, a sign of how successful Bangladesh has been at getting girls into schools and women into the workforce.

“Our females are in school and they are employed, so when they are facing this problem they are coming out with it. Eve-teasing has always happened, but it was not reported as much before,” she said.

But a fundamental transformation in how men treat women looks a distant dream.

At the moment, “perpetrators are being released too easily. If a perpetrator is arrested and the next day he gets bail, the girl is again unsafe and the family is also in danger,” said ASK’s Goswami….

“Bangladeshi girls get little respect in many families, and often boys grow up believing girls are not human beings but sexual objects,” said Dhaka-based psychology professor Mehtab Khanom.

“Traditional attitudes and new technology like mobile phones have combined to change how young people interact and leaving victims, parents and the authorities struggling to respond,” she said.

I hope the government, educators, policy makers, and regular people can work together to overcome this problem. Already the Bangladeshi government has taken action like prosecuting harassers and declaring an Eve Teasing Protection Day.

The US and other countries can learn from these tactics, by first of all acknowledging public harassment to be a problem. Let’s hope it doesn’t take suicides, as it did in Bangladesh, before more people pay attention to the damage street harassment causes.

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Man on motorbike makes woman fearful

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I was walking to my house, and a man on a motorbike was following me conspicuously. He stopped every few yards to wait for me to catch up, then went on again.

I stopped walking, and tried to take a photograph of him from my cellphone. He got nervous immediately, and shouted and asked what I was doing that for. He tried to grab my phone, and I shouted back.

Some people stared, and he rode away on his bike. It left me irritated and angry. I wish I could hurt that man for making me feel afraid to walk on the road.

– Anonymous

Location: Necklace Road, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India.

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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In Delhi, 2 out of 3 women experience harassment

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Safe Delhi PSA

Two out of three women in Delhi suffered sexual harassment at least 2-5 times during the last year. Via the BBC:

“Women in the national capital feel unsafe in many public spaces, and at all times of the day and night,” the survey says.

Public transport, buses and roadsides are reported as spaces where women and girls face high levels of sexual harassment.

Most women who were surveyed said buses were the most unsafe form of transport.

Many said the Metro system, which used to be safer earlier, is now equally crowded and unsafe.

The report says the most common forms of harassment are “verbal (passing lewd comments), visual (staring and leering) and physical (touching or groping or leaning over)”.

Women of all classes have to put up with harassment in their daily lives, but students between 15 and 19 years old and women employed in the informal sector are specially vulnerable, the survey says.

The findings come from a “Safe Cities Baseline Survey” of more than 5,000 people who were interviewed during Jan – March of this year, and the survey was commissioned by the NGO Jagori/Safe Delhi, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and UN Habitat.

The report findings are unsurprising since a study conducted last fall showed that 96 percent of women surveyed in Delhi are afraid to be in public alone because of the high rates of harassment and risk of assault (view a newsclip about the study).

Also,  another survey of women in Delhi from earlier this year tracked their experiences in specific areas of the city and found that 1/3 of the women faced verbal harassment and half of the women felt unsafe there. Several recommendations came out of that survey, including traffic monitoring.

Like most big cities, men’s harassment of women in public places is clearly a huge problem and one that impedes women’s mobility and equality with men. Thankfully, groups like the UN and Jagori/Safe Delhi are addressing this reality.

In addition to surveying people and writing reports, Jagori/Safe Delhi is doing great ground work to make the city safer for women.

Also, check out some of their humorous anti-sexual harassment PSAs on YouTube.

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Harassment in India begins at the airport

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There is no respect for women in India, especially if they Indian women who were born and raised in the U.S or another country. The excuse of these men is that us women born and raised in another country are exotic and must be sluts. As soon as you get to the airport in India, you will be slapped on the butt and groped. Men will automatically start with the gawking and grinning and surrounding you no matter where you go. Even the driver you have, will turn and stare at you when he thinks you are asleep instead of watching the road in front of him, I caught him doing this three times, I did not want a repeat of being groped, so I stayed awake until everyone else woke up.

The men there will keep oggling you and grinning at you and surround you and then look at how they take off when they see someone coming back that should not have told you to stay put in the first place and left you alone. They will oggle you nonstop, in the buses they will sit in front of you, keep their face turned towards you for the whole three hour ride. It is like they are violating you. Relatives will excuses for their so called oggling, and deny all the other things being done. Plus these men have a way of not getting caught and only making it obvious that they victim will be affected. It is hard to ignore this when there are seven or more men harassing you and then they take off when they see someone coming towards you.

These men will come up to you and keep oggling you like you are a piece of meat the whole time you are there. They will grope you, their hands will reach your breasts, they will slap you on the butt, get on the bus you get in even if they are not even getting off at any of the stops, try to break into the bathroom when you are on a train, rub up against you on streets, stalk you in the streets, shops, sit in groups in front of you in restaurants and oggle you for twenty minutes.

They laugh when you yell, get loud and if you ignore them, they will grope- actually they will grope you either way. They will stalk you, even at places of religious worship. I was there for two and a half months and my family did nto really care about what was happening. Their response was: you are just a kid, why would anyone do anything to you? We didn’t see anything. What do you think you are, some kind of a queen? They kept making me sit in random spots while they took off somewhere whether to buy a ticket or buy food.

I tried to get away from the men, they just followed. They will get in front of you and surround you at busstands, on the train, train stations and they will get in your face and keep gawking and grinning. They will know a woman from another country is there even if she is 5 miles away, it is like they all report to each other that a woman from another country is here. Look at they run when they see a person you were with coming in your direction. They will know the exact spot you are in, who is with you and when they have left. Disgusting.

I took this for two months and my brother recently tried to force me to go to India even though it is know what I went through and how they don’t spare you. I also don’t see a reason for one guy to grab the back of my shirt when I was on the bus when he thought I was asleep, he was grabbing the would be bra strap area. A person comes back from there horribly tramautized, constant nightmares, it is like a woman is not able to talk to or feel comfortable around men. It is especially worse when the family does not care because they don’t want their country to look bad. It feels horrible to suffer constant sexual harassment and have your own family dismiss your feelings or outright yell at you in front of the men even though you didn’t do anything. When I was there, my relatives with me didn’t care, when I tried to report a guy to them, this relative outright pushed my arm away from them and the guy just grinned and took off. I can’t tell you about the trauma.

The men most of the times make a run for it before anyone with you can come back to you and yes my family made me sit by myself and would take off to go get something, I was alone in a restaurant for twenty minutes or more and the men there came out of nowhere and started the harassment and then ran when they saw my family coming. They drive you crazy and make others think you are crazy.

These men don’t spare you. It is disgusting. And yes, I am always covered from head to toe- always. Yes, I was wearing the Indian garb. (I am also always covered from head to toe in the U.S)

– SS

Location: India

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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