Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

India: Protests Continue on for #DelhiGangRape Survivor

By

Photo from “I Stand for Safe Delhi”

Yesterday and today, tens of thousands of people marched in Delhi, India, because they feel sick and angry knowing there is a rape reported every 18 hours in their city and they are outraged over the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman last weekend (she is in critical condition in a hospital).

Sadly, in response to this righteous outrage and rallying together, police have used tear gas and water cannons to push back the swelling numbers and they have recently forbidden gatherings of more than five people. But the protesters will not be deterred! They continue on.

This is a partial list of protests that took place today across India, compiled by GotStared.At:

Protests taking place on Sunday, 23 December:

Ahmedabad: Gormoh Circle, 6:30 PM
Ajmer: Circuit House to Collectorate, 6 PM
Bangalore: Town Hall, 11 AM
Chennai: Gandhi Statue, 9:45 AM
Dehradun: Parade Ground, 2:30 PM
Delhi: India Gate, 8 AM, Silent March | India Gate, 3 PM, SlutWalk Protest
Hubli: BVB College of Engineering & Technology, 5 PM
Hyderabad: People’s Plaza, Necklace Road, 4 PM
Jaipur: Statue Circle, 5:30 PM
Kolkata: City Centre, Salt Lake, 12:00 PM
Mumbai: Marine Drive, 5 PM
Nagpur: RBI Square, 11 AM

Follow what is happening via the Twitter hashtag “#DelhiGangRape”

Here are seven things you can do to keep pressure on the government re: this issue.

Related, someone posted this very good article on the Stop Street Harassment Facebook page. Here is an excerpt, with advice on what to do now to stop sexual violence in India:

“Dear young women and men of Delhi, if you want rape to end, you will have to confront those traditions. Confronting those traditions, confronting the known history of patriarchy is not the same thing as demanding capital punishment. In fact, they can be the opposites of each other. By demanding ‘death’ for the rapist, you are tacitly entering into a compact with those who see rape not necessarily as a crime against a free agent, but also as a property crime, as an assault on honor and dignity. My understanding is, and my appeal to all of you is –  stop treating rape as a matter of honor and dishonor altogether, and expose and boycott those who would insist it is a matter of honor and dishonour. Treat it as ordinary, disgusting, evil violence, as the naked expression of power, and you will see that the expression of power is never challenged by the demand for death. It is easy for those who think of women as property to demand death for those who violate their property rights over women. That is why many men who will demand death penalty for rapists will happily go home and rape their wives. (Because in their understanding they cannot ‘rape’ their wives, only strangers can rape ‘their’ wives.)If you want to end rape, to end the forced sexual subjugation of one human being by another. You will have to look elsewhere than the gallows for comfort.

Rape and sexual assault, and other kinds of violence centered on the enjoyment of humiliation are different from other kinds of violence. You could be in the company of violent men, as a man, in a bus, and they would not necessarily slap you around just for the heck of it (unless you ‘looked’ racially different, or were different because of the way you expressed your sexual orientation). But imagine or remember what it is to be a woman on that bus, or to be the ‘wrong’ kind of male – queer, child, racially other, submissive because you are held captive – and things can suddenly go wrong. This is what happened on that bus that the 23 year old paramedic and her friend had boarded. This is what happened when Sharma, Sharma, Singh, Gupta and Thakur and their unnamed juvenile accomplice, decided to assert their position as bipedal upper primates on top of their imagined sexual pyramid. Let us not forget that the matter spiraled when one of the assaulters taunted the woman and her friend for being together at night in Delhi. In their eyes, she had broken the code of sexual slavery, by being a person who had acted as a free agent, as someone who could choose to enjoy her claim to the city, its entertainments, with a companion who happened to be male.

Of course she need not have acted as this free agent for this horrible event to happen. She could have been at home, confined within narrow domestic walls where most rapes in Delhi, and India occur. (I have yet to hear of policemen and politicians advocate the abolition of marriage in the same breath as the closure of pubs, although more rapes happen within marriage than do at or around pubs, clearly neither marriage nor pubs are in themselves the causes of rape, but it is always curious that one should be asked to be banned, though sometimes judges do ask rapists to marry their victims, though no one has yet asked a woman who was attacked or molested at a pub to return to the place where she was assaulted). In this instance, were we to go by the law of statistical averages, the brave 23 year old paramedic was not, but could easily have been the sister, niece, daughter, daughter-in-law or wife of one of the accused. Because the majority of those who get raped in our society are sisters, daughters, daughters-in-law, nieces and wives – and they are raped by brothers, fathers, uncles, fathers-in-law and husbands. Or she could have been a worker raped by her boss, or her colleague. She could have been a student raped by a teacher, a patient raped by a doctor or a warden in a hospital or clinic, an undertrial raped by a policeman, an insurgent or suspect raped by a soldier. She could have been dressed in clothes that she felt helped her enjoy and assert her sexuality, or she could have been dressed in work clothes, she could have been dressed in a burqa, a sari, salwar kameez or in a nun’s habit. She could have been a three year old infant, a teenager, a young woman, a post menopausal woman, even a grandmother.

Anybody at all, other than a man in a position of real or imagined power, can be raped by a man in  a position of real or imagined power. We might as well call this the first and most important law of rape.

This means that you can be raped in order to punish you for having broken the code of sexual slavery (patriarchy) – which is what happens when you are ‘accused’ of being up and about in the night in the city with a man who is not related to you. Or, on the other hand, you can be raped, in order to enforce it, maintain it, irrigate it,  generally show the world – how it works, who’s on top – which is what happens when rapes happen within the four walls of homes, work places, institutions and prisons.

Where does this sense of impunity that seems to govern the actions of so many men come from ? It cannot come from biology alone. Because, thankfully, not all men, not even all men in positions of real or imagined power, are rapists. Rapists choose to access a cultural code of permission. There is something in the cultural baggage or vocabulary available to us all that normalizes sexual violence, even renders it trivial, as a bit of horseplay at worst, or the hallowed order sanctified by tradition, at best.

Dear young men and women of Delhi. There are things you can do to stop rape.

* Shame any man who casually passes misogynist, sexist, remarks.  Shame all those cowards who try to humiliate anyone because of the way their bodies or desires are. Shame them in public.

* Young women, do not retreat from public space. Take back the night. Insist on being out and about. Insist on the conditions that enable your safety. Ask why there are no women bus drivers, women cab drivers. Ask what the Delhi police is doing to punish misogynist officers and constables.

* Young women, please understand that when you hear songs that are violent and misogynist, you can choose to boycott the radio stations and recording companies that put them out. Leave a party or a celebration that plays a Honey Singh song. If you are young man who is a friend of a young woman at any such gathering, leave the celebration with your friend. Call the radio stations, phone in and demand that they stop playing misogynist songs.

* Demand more public transport. Demand a thousand more buses that ply all night. Demand a metro system that stays open late into the night. Demand street lighting. Ask why the car lobby in Delhi can systematically stymie the expansion of public transport in Delhi. If there are not more public buses and metro trains, understand that those who run this city are responsible for rape and assault.

* Take your traditions seriously, and recognize that every religion teaches the subjugation and humiliation of women. Ask men and women of religion what they are going to do to recognize the misogyny in their traditions, to confront and challenge them. Insist that under no conditions can any woman pollute anything around her. insist that women are not property. Not of their fathers, brothers, boy-friends or husbands. Not of the state. Not of God.Understand that people can never be property and must never be viewed as such.Combat and confront anyone who says they can be.

* Shame and expose those politicians and police or army officers who try to cover up cases of sexual assault and rape in Kashmir and the North East and elsewhere. Do not create a hierarchy of more and less important victims.

* Young men, decide now, and for all time, that you will treat the women you encounter first of all as friends, as equals, as people who have as much right to your city as you. Learn to respect a woman’s right to pleasure. To her right to say yes and no. Do not think that ‘no’ means ‘yes’.

* Young men, if you confront a situation in which any man harasses another woman, or any other person, make sure that you will stand up and protest, call attention to what is going on,  and make sure that this stops.

* Young men, and young women, do not reduce the matter of confronting rape and molestation to one of asking the attacker whether or not he has ‘sisters and daughters’ at home. Rapists pray on their sisters and daughters just as easily as they do on strangers.

* Young men and young women, do not ever let anyone tell you that under any circumstances, that your life is not worth living.

I hope you change Delhi forever. I hope that the rest of the country follows your example.

I remain hopeful because of what you did yesterday and today. Do not disappoint me, do not disappoint yourselves. Make your protest viral. Take it everywhere, to workplaces, schools, streets, parks, the metro, to dark and unlit streets, to lit streets and corners. Take over the city. Make it a city that belongs to you and me and the brave 23 year old paramedic still fighting for her life.”

Share

(Wannabe?) Rapists on VIU Campus

By

I was walking back to my car after a night class when a group of about five young men started following me. They were talking to each other, but intentionally kept the volume loud enough so I could hear clearly (they were several meters behind me). They spent several minutes commenting on my skirt, which they deemed slutty, before the conversation turned to how much they enjoyed “gang-raping sluts”. When I got back to my car, I locked it right away and drove home. This isn’t the first or last time I’ve been harassed on campus, but it’s definitely the scariest example.

In the end, I decided not to report because the response to sexual violence around here is worse than useless. A serial groper last year prompted an email telling women to “be careful”, an offer for a women’s self-defense class, and plenty of jokes around campus. RCMP believes that the same man was flashing and assaulting women as early as 2004, and his behavior was still escalating several months later. AFAIK he’s still not been caught. Doesn’t exactly make me feel safe, or give me much confidence in the authorities’ abilities to deal with sexual violence.

– anonymous

Location: Vancouver Island University, Vancouver, Canada

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.

Share

The cost of living in a patriarchal society

By

On Saturday, a group of teenage boys gang raped a 15 year old girl for two-and-a-half hours outside a high school homecoming dance in Northern California. Police say as many as four teenage boys raped her and probably as many as 15 boys stood around watching, doing nothing to stop it or help her.

CNN is reporting that “The victim was found unconscious and ‘brutally assaulted’ under a bench shortly before midnight Saturday, after police received a call from someone in the area who had overheard people at the assault scene ‘reminiscing about the incident.'”

These boys brutalized her so badly that she was in critical condition and had to be flown to hospital. As of Monday, she is in stable condition. Everything about this incident and its outcome are upsetting and outrageous!! (Including CNN using the passive voice to describe the incident and engaging in subtle victim blaming by printing a quote from someone who said she ended up with the guys of her own free will.)

While one of the police officers investigating the case says he can’t believe not one of the bystanders did anything, I am not. Maddeningly, her damaged body, and likely damaged life, is the outcome of living in a patriarchal society where boys and men are encouraged and encourage each other to be aggressive and prove their masculinity through sexual “conquests.”

In my street harassment book research, I’ve learned a lot about this, including male homosociality, which is the idea that many men are socialized to be more eager to please other men than women and may use women as pawns to prove their masculinity and impress each other. Telling sexist jokes and harassing and assaulting women (particularly gang rape) are examples of this behavior. In the Macho Paradox, Jackson Katz discussed in great length how men may feel pressured to participate in or stand quietly by while their friends participate in sexist and even violent behaviors in order to be accepted and “manly.”

The definition of masculinity in our society is so narrowly defined that actions like showing compassion, standing up to “manly” men, and not engaging in sexist or violent behavior – and telling other men to stop – threatens it and what it means “to be a man.” Some men even harass and beat up other men who threaten the definition (most notably, male members of the LGBQT community). So it’s easier for most men to stay quiet and/or participate.

This all directly relates to street harassment, too. For example, the more than 800 women who took my informal, anonymous online survey last fall said they are more fearful when they are harassed by a man who is part of a group or by multiple men in a group than when a lone man harasses them.

If you ask girls and women how they would feel about encountering a group of guys while they’re alone in a deserted area, I bet the fear of gang rape and assault would be quite tangible, even if the men did not harass them. Why? Because even if we don’t know terms like “homosociality” or “hegemonic masculinity” and haven’t read the theories behind such terms, we know that most men are less like to stop or to listen to women when they are in groups. We know they want to impress their friends and many of them will do that at all costs. We know it’s best to book it out of there as fast as we can before they decide to do anything. And guess what, even if this isn’t true of all men, we don’t know which ones it will be true for. Our safety is not worth the risk of trusting a group of male strangers. (and if you say that’s unfair to boys and men who don’t hurt women, I agree, let’s do something about it!)

Katz and groups like Men Can Stop Rape work on bystander intervention with men, including brainstorming and role playing ways they can intervene when they hear sexist talk and witness gender-based violence. They discuss issues of masculinity and the importance of speaking out even if its scary and emphasize that chances, are there are other guys who feel the same way but are too scared to speak out. It’s very important work and I hope more and more groups will use incorporate bystander work in their efforts to make the world a safer place.

Also, working to ease gender socialization and the values given to each gender and their stereotyped traits is important work and it is something we can all do in our daily lives. We can help make sure men – and women – are not penalized for speaking out when they see something wrong. For example we can  eliminate language like “pussy” “wuss” and “girl” when talking about male behavior that is not “macho” and not make fun of boys or men who show their sensitive side. We can encourage people we know to always stand up for what is right even if they think it will make them unpopular. And we can do the same (This is something I struggle with. When I look back at my life, the times I feel most ashamed of myself are when I was too scared to speak up to someone bullying someone else).

Thoughts?

Share