Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Today’s Events – April 12

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It’s the first day of Meet Us On the Street: International Anti-Street Harassment Week, and we already have so much going on!

Virtual Events:

Please join Young Feminists and Allies, the National Organization for Women’s First Virtual Chapter, and Stop Street Harassment for a Google Hangout about Street Harassment from a multicultural perspective.

Holly Kearl, founder of International Anti-Street-Harassment Week, will moderate three brave women with diverse backgrounds as they discuss the similarities and differences in the ways they experience street harassment.

* Kasumi Hirokawa: TCK and trilingual feminist from Shanghai who currently lives in Japan

* MorningStar Angeline: Native American and Latina actress who lived in both the Southwest and West Coast of America

* Muneera Hassan: Bangladeshi-American, Muslim, college student from Boston currently living in Northern VA who wears hijab

There will be a Q&A section, so please send us your questions in advance or during the event at youngfeminists at gmail dot com or Tweet at at @nowyoungfems and please use the #EndSH hashtag.

International Events:

Cameroon: Young Women for a Change, Cameroon is holding a dialogue in Beau with youth and adolescents to address the different forms of Street harassment facing women and girls and how to intervene. [April 12]

Canada (Vancouver): Hollaback! Vancouver will be debuting their interactive campaign and art show “What’s Your Number?” It will enable people to record the frequency and emotions involved with street harassment for 24 hours. Clickers (or counters) will be distributed to initial participants along with a blank notebook. For 24 hours, they will click twice for direct street harassment, and once for an indirect impact. At the end of the 24 hours, the clickee is encouraged to creatively express the experience in the notebook provided through mediums like poetry, illustration or essaying before they’re passed on to the next one. At the end of the week, the notebooks will be collected by the Hollaback Vancouver team for compilation. In order to showcase the process behind What’s Your Number?, the art show will be a free event extended to the community at-large. Part education, part creative and part party, this night will get everyone together in a comfortable space to talk about the effects of street harassment and – most importantly – what can be done. [Campaign kicks of all over the city on April 12th, with the Artshow / wrap up party taking place April 30th 436 Columbia St Vancouver BC 7-11 pm]

Colombia: OCAC Colombia  is hosting SUNDAY, APRIL 12 – 9:00 a.m.: STOP THE STREET HARASSMENT: We will be in the Sunday’s Bikeway and we will will cross cycling the 7th Avenue from Plaza Bolivar to the National Park | DOMINGO 12 DE ABRIL – 9 AM. ALTO AL ACOSO. Estaremos en la Ciclovía y haremos un recorrido por la carrera séptima desde la Plaza de Bolívar hasta el Parque Nacional

Nepal: Hollaback! Kathmandu will be hosting a Stand Up Against Street Harassment event, displaying charts and boards that say street harassment is not okay. They will also be interacting with the local people about what the campaign is and what they can do to respond to street harassment and stop it. [April 12, 3-5pm at Basantapur]

USA Events:

Iowa: Hollaback! Des Moines is hosting their 3rd Annual Chalk Walk to End Street Harassment. [April 12, 1 pm at the Pappajohn Education Center]. Can’t be there in person? Sometime during the week of April 12-18, go back to a street where you experienced harassment. Reclaim that space by writing an empowering message; then take a picture and send it to them at dsm@ihollaback.org! They will post all the photos to their blog after the event.

Pennsylvania: FAAN Mail will be kicking off EndSHWeek with their 5th annual rally and community engagement event. [April 12, 2-5pm at Love Park, Philadelphia]

Virginia: Hollaback! RVA is hosting a Bystander Workshop discussing and presenting on how bystander intervention and street harassment intersect. They will provide “swag bags” and snacks to participants! [Richmond, April 12, time and place TBA]

Plus, some of our groups got an early start on things and hosted these fabulous events on Saturday, April 11th:

Bahamas: Hollaback! Bahamas hosted a meditation and stress relief workshop with the World Peace Initiative.

United Kingdom: Rape & Sexual Abuse Support Centre hosted street action focused on victim-blaming and rape culture (#ThisDoesn’tMeanYes) at Braithwait Tunnel, Braithwaite Street, London.

South Korea: Rok Gi Yeon Promotions hosted “Ladies Night Vol. 2,” a benefit concert to support the charity Disruptive Voices, in Seoul. Find the Facebook event here.

Pakistan: No to Harassment hosted a fabulous panel and discussion about how a woman is #notanobject.

New York: Hollaback! hosted the annual NYC Anti-Street Harassment Rally! The event featured local activists and speakers and include da series of workshops for folks to learn more and take action against street harassment. It also featured Hollaback!’s famous 12 foot inflatable #catagainstcatcalling cat.

Pennsylvania: University of Scranton is hosted a SHARE (Street Harassment Awareness Response and Education) Fair.

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16 Days: Day 10, Pakistan

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During the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence (Nov. 25 – Dec. 10), Stop Street Harassment is featuring activists who took action against street harassment this year, one new country per day.

Day #10: Pakistan

In Karachi, Pakistan, this spring, students at university SZABIST hosted a “How to respond to harassment” session, a self defense class in the spring, and they created a PSA about harassment.

One of the students wrote, “My class group members and I selected ‘harassment’ as a topic for our gender studies course. The reason we chose this topic was because it is a prevalent problem in Pakistan and almost everyone in the country encounters it on a daily basis. We wished to highlight the issue and create awareness.”

The Pakistani organization Gawaahi also addresses street harassment on their website.

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Video: Do you feel harassed?

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Along with few other students, a college student at a university called SZABIST in Karachi, Pakistan, created this PSA as part of a class project. Via email, she sent information about the PSA:

“My class group members and I selected “harassment” as a topic for our gender studies course. The reason we chose this topic was because it is a prevalent problem in Pakistan and almost everyone in the country encounters it on a daily basis. We wished to highlight the issue and create awareness.

Harassment can come in different forms but the generally acceptable definition of harassment is something that disturbs one due to any form of unacceptable behavior inflicted by someone. It exists in the world that we live in and it is out there whether we acknowledge it or not. Many a times, we experience harassment and we go on leading our lives without even realizing it or doing anything to put an end to it.
Harassment can happen in a variety of ways and what we aim to do is to empower people to speak up about it and fight against it but until people realize that they have been harmed, there is little that can be done about it. We have set out to create a couple of ad campaigns that would give awareness to the people about the types of harassment that exist in society and what options we have to fight against it. We seek to spread the word over the internet and in whatever ways we possibly can.”
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“We have to not just sit and take it or ignore it”

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Cross-posted from gawaahi.org

“Street Harassment is a global phenomenon that is largely overlooked, and even considered acceptable despite there being laws against it in many places including Pakistan. Street harassment includes making sexually explicit comments, ogling, whistling, following and groping.

In the making of these videos, we found that many Pakistani women, especially from the lower-middle classes began wearing burqas because they found the additional garment enabling in many ways. However, they find that the problem of street harassment has worsened, and even in burqas, they are harassed as they wait for buses, rickshas, taxis, or walk down the street. The women we spoke with in this series of videos had experienced intimidation that crossed class, age, religion and ethnicity.

We are grateful to the young women featured in this video — Nabiha Meher, Aroosa Shaukat and Mehreen Kasana — for having spoken to us about street harassment. They are all three journalists (as journalism is evolving) whether in the realm of social media, blogs or print.

Made by Naveen Naqvi“

You can view two other films on street harassment by Naveen Naqvi via a blog post from last October.

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Women in Pakistan leave jobs because of commuter harassment

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via Pakistan Today

Some women leave their jobs because of the street harassment they face during their commute, according to a new article about sexual harassment on public transportation in Islamabad, Pakistan.

“This single issue is directly damaging the careers of working women,” reads the article in Pakistan Today.

I’m not surprised. I know street harassment can significantly impact women’s lives. When I conducted an informal study of more than 800 women in 23 countries and 45 US states for my book research, 9 percent of women said they had changed jobs because of harassers along their commute and, related, street harassment had caused nearly 20 percent of the respondents to move neighborhoods.

What does the harassment in Pakistan look like?

Via Pakistan Today:

“Street sexual harassment for a woman in public transport is similar to claustrophobia because she feels trapped in a small place with fear of no escape until she reaches her destination.

If a bus or train is crowded or if a woman is sitting by the window and the man harassing or assaulting her is sitting behind her, she cannot scream or raise her voice since most of the women do not want to get people’s attention in cases like these.

Faiza Bibi is a resident of Bhara Kahu which is a suburban area of the city and she has to travel daily using public transport to reach her workplace. She said most of the drivers harass female passengers; sometimes they even touch the female passenger sitting next to them on the front seats while pretending as if they were merely shifting the gear.

She complained that the behaviour of drivers, especially of the vans plying on the Route Number 127, was unbearable.

“Women have no other option since they have to sit on the front seats, next to the driver, because they are the only seats meant for women,” she explained.

She lamented that the drivers took advantage of the situation by harassing women; sometimes by touching, staring or playing loud vulgar songs but the women commuters usually avoided complaining to anyone because they felt too embarrassed to tell anybody.”

Of course Pakistan is not the only country with this problem. New York City, Boston, and Chicago all have PSA campaigns focused on sexual harassment on the buses and subways because studies showed more than 60 percent of riders faced harassment.

Many countries like Japan, India, and Brazil have women-only subway cars offered during rush hour because of the problem of sexual harassment and this is a “solution” Islamabad may turn to as well if they can get the finances for it. 92 percent of women surveyed there said they want to have women-only public transportation. But actually, what they probably want is just no harassment, not necessarily segregation. Since no one in the government seems to care about actually ending the harassment, segregation probably sounds appealing and certainly could be a short-term solution to offer them relief. But it will not fix the problem in the long run.

Fortunately, there are people speaking out against street harassment in Pakistan whose efforts may lead to more long-term change. One example is in Karachi, Pakistan, where a new NGO called Gawaahi creates media for awareness and advocacy. They recently produced two short video clips about street harassment in Pakistan as a way to start raising awareness about the problem.

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