Julissa Ferreras Archives | Stop Street Harassment

USA: City Council Member Tackles Street Harassment

October 28, 2015 By HKearl

NYC Hearing on Street Harassment, Oct. 2010

Five years ago this week, NY City Council Member Julissa Ferreras called the first-ever hearing on street harassment. My first book was used in the briefing papers and I was the first to testify. More than a dozen of us, ranging in age from 14 to 52 and representing many races and genders, gave testimonies about street harassment and how it impacts our lives. The hearing was covered by scores of outlets and CM Ferreras has remained committed to the issue in various ways ever since.

One of our former volunteers Raquel Reichard works for Latina.com and did a great interview with CM Ferreras this week. Here is an excerpt, but the whole interview is worth a read!

CM Ferreras and Holly Kearl in Feb. 2011

“In 2010, when you were chair of the committee on women’s issues, you organized the first-ever city council hearing on street harassment. Why was it important for you to do this?

As young girls, we are taught to ignore this behavior, but then we are told to not put up with domestic violence when we are grown up. How does that make sense? So, for me, it was a great opportunity to share with women that their situation mattered.

I had just gotten elected in November of 2009, so I felt I had the opportunity to use my authority as a council member to have a hearing on this topic. Seventy-five women came up to testify. Women took time off from their day, sat through testimonies and talked about street harassment, because it’s an important conversation.

How can governments make streets safer for women?

For starters, it’s important to create a space where we can hear women speak about the problem. When I held the hearing, I heard stories about girls and women being harassed when walking up the stairs to elevated trains. If you stand underneath the stairs, you can look up the girls’ skirts. Maybe we need to rethink the way we build train stations and the stairs, and that becomes a governmental issue. Also, here in New York, we deal with Daylight Savings Time, meaning it gets dark when we still have whole days ahead of us. And we know, from studies, that women feel unsafe in dark settings. So we need to work on improving lighting in neighborhoods, and we need to work with small businesses that might leave their lights on throughout the night. I’ve done this in the past, and bodegas are willing to leave their lights lit if it’s for the safety of their community

But also, we need to get police departments to take this issue seriously, to listen to women and take their reports.”

New York City Safety Audit a Success

May 8, 2012 By HKearl

Cross-posted with permission from New York City Council Member Julissa Ferreras’ Facebook page:

“Council Member Julissa Ferreras and the nonprofit organization Hollaback! led an historic community safety audit on Saturday, May 5th in Queens from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Community members met at The Transfiguration Of Christ Greek Orthodox Church, 3805 98th Street, Corona, New York for training. Afterwards they surveyed blocks in their neighborhood where residents expressed safety concerns and developed a concrete plan to address those concerns.

“This audit focused on women’s safety is a key step in the crime prevention effort in my district. We hope to develop a better understanding of the community’s needs and concerns to help reduce the risk of crime against women in the future and I am proud to collaborate with Hollaback! in this effort,” stated Council Member Julissa Ferreras.

The audit gathered important information from the community including the ratio of men to women, how public space is being utilized and details on how well roads, parks and public transit stops are lit at nighttime. In addition, audit participants answered questions on how safe they feel when occupying public spaces.

“It takes a community to make communities safer. Block by block, we’re going to work together with community members, organizations, and government to develop concrete improvements for how we can make Queens safer,” says Hollaback! Executive Director Emily May.

Community safety audits are a UN-identified best practice to address street harassment in communities across the world….

Following an assessment of the audit data, recommendations to create safer spaces for women in Queens will be submitted to the city agencies. Council Member Ferreras and Hollaback! have already discussed plans to paint over graffiti, increase street lighting, create harassment-free zones around public schools and install an anti-harassment PSA campaign in public spaces such as parks and bus stops.

Audit participants received lunch a free T-shirt. Representatives from NYC agencies attended including NYPD, NYC Department of Transportation, and the Mayor’s Community Affairs Unit. Collaborating community organizations include Elmcor Senior Services, Dominican American Society (DAS), Ecuadorian Civic Committee, Make the Road New York, and Community Board 3 members This event was generously supported by: Health First, Dominicana Radio Dispatcher, Mama’s Leo’s Latticini, Transfiguration of Christ Greek Orthodox Church, and SD Printing.”

Congratulations to the organizations in NYC that made this possible and I look forward to reading/reporting on updates on what else they do.

METRAC based in Toronto, Canada, launched the safety audit model in the 1980s and have led audits throughout Canada since then. The United Nations uses the audit system to evaluate communities worldwide. It’s a great model to use to get a sense for how safe people feel in their communities.

In Washington, DC, where I’m based, Holla Back DC/Collective Action for Safe Spaces and I led 50 people in 10 teams across the city to do safety audits. A daytime audit took place on March 20, 2011, and an evening one on May 5, 2011. Our efforts were covered by the Washington Post.

All of us who led the audits have full time jobs and volunteered our time to organize it. We were not able to organize it as thoroughly and get the kind of diversity of participants as we wanted. And perhaps we were too ambitious to audit the whole city instead of just one or two neighborhoods. For these reasons, we have not yet used our results to advocate for specific changes the way the audit leaders in NYC will. I love the nonprofit + government partnership NYC followed and I hope that the next time we do audits in DC, we will be able to have that kind of partnership.

45 women report gropes on the street in Astoria, NY

August 23, 2011 By HKearl

On the heels of the arrest of the alleged Upper East Side Manhattan groper, the problem of men groping women in public is back in the news after a series of groping reports in Queens, New York.

From the Queens Chronicle:

“If you have breasts, you get hit on. That’s how this neighborhood is,” said Nicolle Loayza, 26. She was talking about Jackson Heights, where she was born and raised. A man accused of groping three women in the neighborhood on two different occasions last July is still at large, said Councilman Danny Dromm (D-Jackson Heights) this week.

On the heels of these attacks and a spate of separate groping incidents reported in Astoria and the Upper East Side, council members Julissa Ferreras (D-Corona) and Dromm stood on the corner of 90th Street and Roosevelt Avenue to pass out fliers with the police drawing of the Jackson Heights groper last week.

In Astoria, various groups, including the New York Anti Crime Agency and the office of Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Astoria), have mobilized to make community members more aware of the problem and help women in the neighborhood.

At least two different men accused of groping Astoria women have been arrested, according to Vallone’s office. Published reports have identified these two men as Miguel Hermenegildo, 33, and Dennis Bryan, 22. A different Queens man, Jose Alfredo Perez Hernandez, 18, has been arrested in connection with gropings on the Upper East Side.

The issue first came to attention last July because of Kate Salute, an Astoria woman who blogged about being groped on “Why Leave Astoria?” prompting an outpouring of similar stories from other women. Salute wrote in an email that some 45 women have since come forward…

In Jackson Heights, Loayza pointed to the spot on Roosevelt Avenue where she said men often wait just to look up women’s skirts when they climb the stairs to the 90th St. 7 train.

She described the time a man grabbed her crotch a few blocks away when she was just 12 years old, and said men often follow her home from the train, catcalling her along the way. However, she has never reported a single incident.

“I’ve learned to deal with it,” she said. “You just walk around the block and try to lose them.”

But Ferreras thinks this is precisely the problem.

“It’s not just about shrugging it off or avoiding a corner,” Ferreras said.

Dromm, Ferreras and Vallone are encouraging women in their districts to continue coming forward.”

At what point does this constitute a hate crime?! 45 women have been groped in one area just for being female in public. What the hell.

I’m glad local leaders are taking action and working to fix the problem and that there was an awareness rally last week. Ladies of Astoria, keep sharing your story!

I’m not surprised Ferreras is one of the individuals speaking out; she called the first-ever street harassment city council hearing in NYC last year. She’s a great advocate for ending street harassment.

Now, the outcry needs to continue until the groping ends.