harassment Archives | Stop Street Harassment

USA: Post-Election Street Harassment in New Orleans

November 28, 2016 By Correspondent

Sequoya La Joy, Louisiana, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

After GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump won the votes of the electoral college this November, the climate for women in New Orleans has changed. As a university student, our on-campus counseling center has been extremely busy and overbooked since after the election. As a sexual assault advocate on campus, I have received an increase number of calls from people who are scared to be assaulted and scared to go out in public.

I walk a small six block commute from my parking garage to my workplace and while on this commute have had an increase of unwanted comments on my body parts than I have even in the summer when I wear less clothing. I have died turquoise hair at the moment and have had multiple men stop me to tell me they like my hair and then ask me if the carpet matches the drapes. I also had a man walk closely behind me for 6 blocks at 2 am until I stopped to pretend to make a phone call. When I stopped, I made sure I was in a well lit place and the man stopped too. He asked if I spoke Spanish and if I had the time and could help him. I answered back in Spanish and told him the time and he told me he was visiting from Central America and then invited me to follow him and party. I told him I was on my way somewhere and waited until he walked a few blocks ahead before I turned the corner to walk towards my parking garage. I realize I feel much safer knowing that my parking garage has 3 entrances that need keycodes to be opened but I still do not feel safe on the six block walk from my work to my car that I have taken hundreds of times.

I also recently went thrift shopping with a friend of mine. A male employee of the shop stopped us several times while we were together and after we had separated. It seemed as if the man had an intellectual disorder or impairment but he still touched my shoulder and back in a way that made me uncomfortable and complimented my hair and clothing. He also told my friend multiple times that he liked her legs and how nice her legs looked in the boots. When we exited the store, he held the door for us and whispered in her ear about her killer legs and told us to both be sweet. In this situation, I knew the employee was overstepping boundaries by continuing to find us in the store and initiate conversation. I also knew by his sexual comments about my friend’s legs and his touching of my shoulder and back that this would be considered sexual harassment. However, as I read this man may have been intellectually impaired, I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t want to cause a scene or come off as mean and the friend I was with who would have normally told someone who was making her uncomfortable to get lost also didn’t know what to say to this man.

I thought a lot about this after getting home and I thought about the Republican state I live in. It made me think if I had any place to tell this man not to talk to women like that when the president elect had publicly shamed, assaulted, harassed, and insulted women. I have personally experienced more street harassment this month than in other months and now am at a crossroads about how to deal with it. Also, after the incident of being harassed by the store employee, I wonder if women will ever be able to escape being subjected to harassment. In this political climate, what are politicians and the media doing to try and reduce instances of sexual harassment and assault?

Who is responsible for educating harassers on how to treat women?

Is it the job of the harassed to constantly educate and inform their harassers that what they’re doing is wrong, uncomfortable, and scary?

I feel as a woman who has dealt with a lot of harassment in public and private spaces over the years, that it is not my responsibility to prevent my own harassment or educate my harassers. Sometimes, I am tired and cannot grapple with the mis-education our patriarchal society has given my harassers and I believe that that is okay.

It is not our job to educate our harassers.

Sequoya is a Native American and Italian woman from Chicago who fell in love with New Orleans. She’s currently a Sociology Major at Loyola University New Orleans and supports her higher education habit by slinging drinks to the masses. She aspires to attain a PhD and write a best seller. She currently operates a small blog.

Women Should Not Be Harassed at UK Clinics

April 15, 2016 By Contributor

Earlier this week, author and Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates spoke at an Abortion Rights event in Parliament on protecting women from harassment and abuse at UK clinics. She gave me permission to share the speech here, as part of International Anti-Street Harassment Week:

Let’s be very clear –this is not a debate about abortion. That debate already takes place, vociferously, elsewhere, from our parliament to our media to our universities to our streets.

This is not about freedom to have a conversation that is already happening widely. This is about harassment. It is about the aggressive, intimidating, upsetting experience of women being harassed at the point of access to a wide variety of different healthcare services, including reproductive healthcare.

This is not about protest, which could take place anywhere, it is about bullying women, making them feel anxious, creating a hostile and unpleasant environment for both service users and healthcare workers.

This is not a debate about abortion.

Because anybody who wants to have a real impact on abortion recognises that place to do so effectively is not at the point of access, but in and outside parliament, where policy is debated, not outside clinics where women already have the legal right to access services and should be able to do so without fear, harassment and intimidation.

The impact on women at what may be a very vulnerable, private and personal time must not be underestimated. Harassment doesn’t have to include shouting, threats or abuse to be deeply impactful and upsetting. Simply being shown some of the extremely graphic and sometimes inaccurate images protesters often hold, being filmed against one’s wishes at this private time, or being made aware that somebody is actively praying against you can cause huge emotional turmoil and distress. When a United Nations Delegation on human rights visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced anti-choice protesters outside, they described it as “a kind of terrorism”.

Writing about their experiences of clinic harassment on Twitter, women said:

It made me feel like I was taking the walk of shame

It made me feel sick

I’ve never seen anything like that in real life

The protesters scared me

One woman wrote:

I used to work at an abortion clinic. Now I’d be too scared.

There is no reasonable argument that such harassment is necessary or effective, because there can be no reasonable argument that any woman reaching the point of attending an appointment with an abortion provider hasn’t already heard the arguments against abortion – because we live in a society where these arguments are everywhere. No woman grows up thinking of her control over her own body as complete and unchallenged, because we do not live in a society where that notion goes without loud and vigorous debate, and indeed, because we live in a society where our sisters in Northern Ireland, for example, are still denied such basic rights.

In fact, women are forced to hear other peoples’ opinions about abortion throughout their lives, as these Everyday Sexism Project entries show:

“While in year 10 my science teacher felt it appropriate to share his views on how he believed abortion was too flexible and should not be allowed up to 24 weeks. After telling him that I believed that it should be allowed up to 24 weeks he looked at me in disgust and told me that ‘those’ women should not be allowed to have children at all.”

“A male colleague told me men should decide about abortion law and time limits because women are too emotional and have a personal bias which is why we have 24 weeks which he says is “really late” and puts too much focus on “what the woman herself wants”.”

“In my 1st year at University I remember a young man standing up and announcing: “I would never date a woman who has had an abortion, this is disgusting, these kind of women are damaged goods.”

“My husband said that a women should be able to decide to take her top off for men if she wants to that she should have control over her own body but that a woman should not be able to have an abortion because that is murder”

“I was watching a discussion of abortion on a political panel show. There was one woman who kept trying to speak up while the men around her loudly spoke against abortion. She even tried to start sentences like ‘well since this is an issue that particularly affects women…’ but the man next to her said ‘hold on a second, let me finish’. The show went to commercial and moved on to a new subject before she got to speak at all.”

Across society, the voices we hear least in debates about abortion are those of people who have actually had one. Women are shouted down in these conversations because a lot of these conversations are driven by thinly veiled misogyny. The sexist idea that bearing children is a woman’s sole purpose and responsibility. The patriarchal notion that society has a greater right to dictate what happens to a woman’s body than she does herself. The misogynistic idea that women’s lives are less important.

That’s why it is so vitally important that at the point when a woman is accessing the reproductive healthcare which is her legal right, she is, in that moment, at the very least, able to do so safely, without harassment, bullying, shaming or intimidation.

This is not a debate about abortion. It is about harassment, misogyny and bullying.

Amnesty International Says Refugee Women Face Sexual Abuse

January 18, 2016 By HKearl

Amnesty International just released a report about sexual abuse of refugee women traveling to Europe. Here’s an excerpt from their press release:

“Governments and aid agencies are failing to provide even basic protections to women refugees traveling from Syria and Iraq. New research conducted by Amnesty International shows that women and girl refugees face violence, assault, exploitation and sexual harassment at every stage of their journey, including on European soil.

The organization interviewed 40 refugee women and girls in Germany and Norway last month who travelled from Turkey to Greece and then across the Balkans. All the women described feeling threatened and unsafe during the journey. Many reported that in almost all of the countries they passed through they experienced physical abuse and financial exploitation, being groped or pressured to have sex by smugglers, security staff or other refugees.”

USA/India: We Need Equality in the Kitchen and the Streets

January 14, 2016 By Correspondent

Rupande Mehta, New Jersey, USA SSH Blog Correspondent

A few days ago I came across a picture on Facebook that compared rotis (Indian bread) made by wives through a traditional (arranged) marriage and love marriage. The arranged marriage wife’s roti looked excellent, had the desired plumpness and was extremely edible. It looked like something that comes out of my mom’s kitchen. The love marriage roti, on the other hand, looked far from edible; burnt and flat. It was nothing like what most Indian men would expect when they sit down to dinner. And if they did, their disappointment would be transparent or there would be facetious innuendo in reference to the wife’s culinary skills.

I don’t know how to make rotis, never learnt and frankly don’t care that I cannot make them. My husband can cook and we never discussed my inability to make a particular kind of food. Still, that picture bothered me. The collective consciousness inside me took a dramatic turn for the worse when a friend passed along the source of the link; a popular food curation portal, Food Talk India. Shared as a ‘funny meme’, the site claimed it posted the picture in ‘good humor’ but when there was backlash from several quarters of the society, they wisely took the picture down. Despite the criticism, the site though through one their cronies, sent Vagabomb what they thought of the controversy: a picture of a penis.

Now I am not a bra burning feminist, I like my bra where it belongs…thank you very much but such pictures and attitudes are at the very crux of the gender inequality debate. These are the ideas that propagate the belief that a woman belongs in the kitchen and the man does not. In India, where the last few years have seen stalwart economic progress, such pictures successfully demonstrate the long road women have to fight to get justice and equal societal norms. It shows the kinds of “standards” we expect from a woman of honor; the one who always “does the right thing” and knows how to keep her husband happy and her family cultured.

If we all engage in eating, is it not discriminatory to expect only the woman to cook? Putting a woman to such practices is no different than saying that she deserves to be catcalled on the streets or she has no right to dress a certain way and if she was assaulted it is definitely because she brought it on. It sets the stage for those other crimes that we get so passionate about and want to castrate men for.

I do not believe that any gender is superior. My feminism is not a fight to make one gender better than the other but to fight for equality. If I am expected to cook and clean so should my male counterpart. If I am told, “you have no marital prospects because your rotis are burnt”, so should a man. We do not live in a primeval world where the man hunts and the woman gathers. We have reached the era where men and women walk toe to toe and contribute equally to the welfare of a family.

In a day where women are constantly breaking the glass ceiling, why are we still circulating pictures of the rotis they can make? At which level is this funny? And how are such attitudes supposed to break the stereotypes that lead to other aggressive assaulting behaviors towards women? Believe it or not, these “hilarious” photos lay the foundation to prejudiced mentality and contribute in the next layer of beliefs that women can be harassed on the streets, raped or do not have the right to consent.

Perhaps Kalki Koechlin is right and the issue of women’s safety will forever burn in India. In her latest poem, “The Printing Machine”, the outspoken and fierce actor has succinctly laid down everything that is wrong with our culture. Making several references to the countless rapes registered in the country since 2012, she says, “How our great Indian heritage fell to its knees at the mercy of our innocent little printing machines.” Set to a percussive soundtrack, Kalki delivers a scathing attack on stereotypes, indifferent attitudes and India’s traditional culture that is used to primarily promulgate further discrimination of women.

In the end it is not about the dumb picture. Also, I am not making a big deal out of nothing. A subtle picture such as this goes a long way in showing that there still exist many educated men from our generation, who fought for Nirbhaya and stand for women’s safety, delving on attitudes where the size and texture of women’s rotis is used as a reminder of their real role in society. It goes to show that despite India’s equality and safety movement, my mom’s premonition for women, at some level, was accurate: no matter how educated we are; we will always end up in the kitchen.

A picture speaks a thousand words. This one did just that.

Rupande grew up in Mumbai, India, and now resides in the U.S. She has an MBA and is currently working towards her MPA, looking to specialize in Non Profit Management. You can find her writing on her blog at Rupande-mehta.tumblr.com or follow her on Twitter @rupandemehta.

Islamophobia Spreads – But Some Challenge It

December 27, 2015 By HKearl

After the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, which were both carried out by Islamic radicals, there has been an increase in Islamophobia. For example, in the U.S., we have seen support for terrible ideas like banning all Muslims from this country or rejecting Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS. This is despite that fact that around one billion other Muslims are perfectly peaceful and 70 thousand Muslim clerics have issued a fatwa denouncing terrorist organizations and attacks.

The rise is Islamophobia also plays out in public spaces. For example, NPR recently produced a story about an increase in backlash and harassment toward Muslim women who wear hijabs.

Other countries are seeing a rise in harassment, too. In the UK, the Independent reported “that there’s been a sharp increase in hate crimes towards British Muslims after the Paris attacks. In the week following the killings, there have been 115 incidents mostly towards girls and women aged between 14 and 45.”

Fortunately, various media outlets are speaking out against this behavior, like the Washington Post: “In communities across America, we are turning on each other, on the very neighbors who have been part of the fabric of our country for decades…The rhetoric dominating our nation right now is anything but civil. It’s time for all of us to put a stop to it.”

23-year-old Ruhi Rahman thanked passengers for the support in a Facebook post.

Two of my favorite stories of resistance come from the UK:

“23-year-old Ruhi Rahman said a woman sitting next to her jumped in to help after a man started to make racially threatening comments towards her. After the woman intervened, most of the other passengers on the Tyne and Wear Metro also stepped in forcing the man to leave the train…

Last week, a London commuter stepped in to defend a young Muslim woman after she was racially abused in a rant on the tube. 22-year-old Ashley Powys wrote in a Facebook post that he was travelling on a Victoria line train on Nov. 16 when he saw a man in his 30s shouting at the teenager and calling her a terrorist.”

I encourage everyone to stand up and speak out against Islamophobia! It is unwarranted and unacceptable.