Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Reflecting on Street Harassment

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Experiences from India to the US:  Prevention, Allyship & Community Accountability

This Sunday, April 7th, marked the beginning of the 9th Annual Anti-Street Harassment Week (7-13 April, 2019) hosted and organized by Stop Street Harassment (SSH). Being a SSH blog correspondent in the past and a proud volunteer and advocate of Stop Street Harassment, I feel honored to contribute my experiences and insights to this important movement to prevent and end street harassment across the globe.

I was born and raised in the city of Mumbai, India, and I have been living in the US for the past 15 years. I identify as a cisgender woman, first-generation immigrant from India, of Hindu ethnicity, and my pronouns are she/her/hers.

Mumbai Buses (c) Meghna Bhat

Recently, I was in India for several weeks and street harassment was sadly part of that experience. In fact, every time I visit my family in India, I can’t help but tense up over the “possibility” of being groped, touched, teased, or catcalled by men we encounter in public spaces because of what I have experienced there in the past. When I was in middle school, when an uncle laughingly told me, “consider it [being harassed] as a compliment.”

 

A screenshot of the NDTV Indian News segment

When as a young girl, I received such dismissing and trivializing responses (intentional or unintentional) from the community, my experiences of feeling violated are “normalized.” Further, when this is combined with toxic, unhealthy, glamorized and romanticized examples of street harassment, non-consensual contact and touching, and “romantic” aggressive love conveyed through popular culture, namely Bollywood Indian cinema—it was very easy to fall into the sinkhole wanting to believe in the “normalized,” “romanticized”, and “glamorized” notions about street harassment and sexual violence.

What traumatized me while growing up in India was also a lack of concept of physical and emotional space, setting boundaries, getting consent or asking permission, especially during Indian festivals such as the festival of color, Holi, is an alien concept. These spaces shared with our family and friends or with our neighbors and communities are intended to be safe and to enjoy the festivities without worrying about feeling violated, groped, touched and unpleasant.

Now, I am perceived as a party pooper when I am asked to join Holi celebrations here in the diaspora, but many don’t realize how it can be triggering and traumatizing to those who have been harassed and experienced sexual violence in these festive community spaces. I recognize that although not all Indian festivities especially Holi may be unsafe & unpleasant or/and not everyone who celebrates may have experienced these unwanted behaviors from others, we need to acknowledge and recognize that religious and community festivals such as these are often used as avenues for exerting power and control through harassment. To look out for one another and intervening when someone is feeling uncomfortable, or incoherent, unconscious or is saying no but is still being harassed or coerced, are essential steps we as allies can do to prevent this from happening in the first place.

Mumbai Couple Using Cell Phone (c) Victorgrigas

In my recent trip to India, I was disheartened overhearing a group of young college students in the train sharing their stories of how they and their respective partners were harassed, policed, questioned, and threatened by local police officers for loitering and spending time in public spaces such as a public park or bus stop or the promenade. These girls and women were frightened and traumatized with the police misuse of power and control. The questioning and moral policing targeted at the girls is based in sexism, patriarchal notions of sexuality and pre-marital relationships, and lack of belief in women’s autonomy.

Bhopal Queer Pride Parade (c) Mukesh bari

Even after the overturn of Section 377 in India which was used to criminalize homosexual relationships– LGBTQ-identified folks including the hijra community continue to be harassed and assaulted by police officers in their custody. So now, in addition to figuring out how to not get harassed and catcalled, vulnerable groups such as young girls and women, LGBTQI, and also individuals with disabilities all across the world also have to take extra steps to make sure they are not targeted by authorities and the state.

We have to acknowledge the prevalence of sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, ableism and other intersectional forms of oppression before we tackle street harassment in public spaces and sexual violence.

A lot of my points above may overlap with a blog on SSH I had written in 2015, but I feel we need to have these conversations of how to be an ally and bystander with our family and friends- no matter how uncomfortable it may be! We have to be mindful of not to publicly out other possible survivors who may have disclosed their experiences to us or force folks to share their stories. Learning to respect victims/survivors’ decision of sharing their stories and their way of healing is a must.

Also, what about our individual responsibility and collective accountability to address prevalence of street harassment and create safe, inclusive, accessible, and supportive public spaces shared by all?

Shouldn’t we all want to envision such a beautiful, safe, harassment-free space for our children and youth?

The younger and future generations must be able to focus on their education, employment, good quality of life and health without the hassle. In the movement to prevent and end all forms of gender violence across all identities, it is absolutely crucial that the responsibility of prevention must not come solely on the shoulders of the marginalized and vulnerable groups especially survivors at the expense of their mental, physical, and psychological health.

 Last but not the least, I want to underline the importance of how this post is not just about experiencing street harassment growing up in India or that this problem exists only in South Asian or “developing countries” as perceived by western countries. For instance, the 2018 SSH study indicates street harassment is highly prevalent in the US. Unfortunately, street harassment is a worldwide problem, a human rights violation, and a public health epidemic affecting all. It needs to be given urgent attention in terms of prevention, intervention, accessible resources, and survivor-centered and trauma-informed support.

 

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Sexual Abuse by American Police Officers

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Sadly, there are street harassers and sexual abusers among the members of the (mostly male) law enforcement in the U.S. and internationally (and of course, in the U.S. we also have racists and murderers among them too). This is a topic I touch on in my new book Stop Global Street Harassment: Growing Activism Around the World.

But I also want to highlight two recent news stories in the U.S. that exemplify this problem… and show why so many people hesitate to or refuse to go to law enforcement officers for help when they do face street harassment or other forms of sexual violence. We need a law enforcement #revolution before many of us will ever feel safe turning to them.

From the Washington Post:

“In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.

The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records.

‘It’s happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country,” said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “It’s so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them.’….

Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities — they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.

In interviews, lawyers and even police chiefs told the AP that some departments also stay quiet about improprieties to limit liability, allowing bad officers to quietly resign, keep their certification and sometimes jump to other jobs.

The officers involved in such wrongdoing represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands whose jobs are to serve and protect. But their actions have an outsized impact — miring departments in litigation that leads to costly settlements, crippling relationships with an already wary public and scarring victims with a special brand of fear.”

Via CNN.com:

“For about six months, [Oklahoma City police officer Daniel] Holtzclaw preyed on women — all African-American — in one of Oklahoma’s poorest neighborhoods, exploiting his police badge to intimidate them into keeping quiet.

Prosecutors say the Oklahoma City officer selected his victims based on their criminal histories, figuring their drug or prostitution records would undermine any claims they might make against him.

Then, he would subject them to assaults that escalated from groping to oral sodomy and rape.

On Thursday, his 29th birthday, Holtzclaw rocked back and forth in his chair, sobbing, as the judge read the verdict [convicting him on 18 of 36 counts of rape and other sexual offenses against women he encountered on patrol. Jurors recommended a total of 263 years of prison time. He will be sentenced in January.]”

Read about the brave women who reported him, eventually leading to his conviction.

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USA: Police Violence is a Form of Street Harassment

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Hannah Rose Johnson, Arizona, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

This month I talked with Pat Farr, a member of Hey Baby! Collective, in Tucson, AZ, about the intersections of sexual violence that are embedded in societal institutions; the sort of intersections that are more complex to organize around—specifically how profiling by police and police brutality constitute street harassment.

Farr presented an analysis of the nuances, scopes and the limits of perfect-victim narratives. When we think of street harassment solely as a cat-calling, where is power moving, what identity is created and who is being left out?

Farr says, “…rape culture is really a complex system that creates a framework for identifying who is a victim and who is a perpetrator. And if someone doesn’t fit into these tropes of victim/perp then it they fall outside of the discourse and are not victims and not perpetrators. So I like the term perfect and imperfect victim…[…] With street harassment it’s even more difficult. There’s very few protections against street harassment to begin with. So this notion of a perfect victim becomes subjectively very difficult to define.”

The first is the Office on Violence Against Women’s definition of sexual assault, which is defined as: any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs by force or without consent of the recipient of the unwanted sexual activity. Farr says that “The definition of sexual assault by the OVW includes street harassment.”

The second is the Center for Disease and Control’s uniform surveillance on sexual violence, which extends to noncontact unwanted sexual experiences. “This,” says Farr, “is very similar to non-consensual behavior of a sexual nature as described by the OVW.”

The third is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s definition of sexual harassment which includes offensive remarks about a person’s sex. The EEOC goes on to define sex-based discrimination as: discrimination against an individual because of gender identity, including transgender status, or because of sexual orientation. “As such,” Farr argues that “because sexual harassment is a form of sexual discrimination, according to the EEOC, harassment based on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination.”

“This gives us the opportunity to extend the definition of street harassment,” Farr says, “according to these definitions, it is street harassment when a transgender woman walking down the street is attacked because of her gender identity, and hence this would count as sexual violence.”

Farr brought up the case of Monica Jones—a black transwoman, sex worker rights activist and MSW student in Phoenix, AZ. She was arrested after a demonstration for sex workers when she took a ride from an undercover, and refused the driver’s proposition. Farr told me that “even though she refused the driver’s propositions, she was still arrested on the prostitution related crime against morality, manifestation of prostitution.” This kind of law, within the city municipal code crimes against morality, is known as “manifestation of prostitution.” It’s a kind of profiling law when a police officer thinks someone looks like a sex worker and is doing something in an area where sex workers would be.

“…it’s essential to recognize that people of color, lower class people, LGBQ people, transgender people, and HIV positive people all are at greater risk of police violence that’s based largely on culturally defined stereotypes of sexuality,” Farr states, “Compulsive heterosexuality, heteronormativity, white supremacy, neoliberal economics, and the prison industrial complex are all bound up with street harassment as a form of institutional violence against particular identities.”

Identities in the margins present different relationships to power which are reinforced through all of our state-sanctioned systems. These identities—these people and their lives—are vulnerable in the face of systems that reproduce heterosexuality, white supremacy, patriarchy and transphobia. These systems rely on exclusion and violence to function, and create our cultural understanding of who is a victim and what terms make a victim.

What Farr is saying here gives us a wider framework to think about who is a victim of street harassment. It is no longer only the person walking down the street being cat-called, it’s also person being profiled by police and arrested because of their gender identity and race.

This allows us to see police violence as a form of street harassment that is inevitably tied to the state.

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Parallels of street harassment & police harassment

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Stopping street harassment is going to take women and men. The problem is that it’s often viewed as a woman’s issue alone, which clearly neglects that the majority of those who harass are men. As a Black man, I seldom worry about going somewhere having a person make unwanted advances, touching my person, or live in the constant fear that any moment I could be accosted.

Or do I?

In hearing the testimonies of women enduring street harassment, I couldn’t help but hear the testimonies of young men of color regarding police harassment. While street harassment and police harassment have key difference, in many important ways they’re similar.* Here are three important parallels:

It’s everywhere– I live in New York City, the mecca of diversity. However, when you look at the stop-and-frisk numbers for the city you find that Black and Latino (predominantly male) residents are singled out. In 2009, of 576,394 stops and frisks were performed and 84 percent of them were on Blacks and Latinos. This is astronomically high, given that Black and Latino compose roughly 26 and 27 percent of the population respectively. The harassment that men of color often undergo via the police is a constant pressure. When walking through Harlem, I routinely see Black boys approached by undercover officers and forced to submit to “random searches.”

These searches are anything but random and serve to make young boys and men feel unsafe in their own communities. In the same way that young men of color are subject to an “invisible force” that disrupts their life without consent, young women of color feel the same. Somehow we live in communities where both men and women of color feel unsafe, displaced and harmed by harassment. Neither forms of harassment lead to safer communities or healthy relationships.

It’s illegal- When we look at the stop-and-frisk data from NYC we see the number on reason someone is stopped and frisked is “furtive movement.” Do you know what that is? Me neither. In fact, you’re not supposed to! The goal is to find any reason possible to stop and deter you from going where you’re going or living your life peacefully. Sound familiar?

Of course disproportionately stopping and frisking people is illegal, just as street harassment should be, but too many of us turn a blind eye to both. It’s going to take those that are the most and the least affected by street harassment and police harassment to come together to fight them. One sided action is not enough.

Knowledge is Powerful!

The Center for Constitutional Rights and Hollaback! have begun to carefully documenting the incidents of harassment. But we all must realize documentation is not enough! As organizers and members of communities, we need to create models that reduce levels of harassment, increase feelings of safety, and heal wounds within communities where gender violence, police violence, and all forms of violence have cracked the foundation.

Here in New York, I work with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement which has developed as Know Your Rights campaign for communities of African descent. The People’s Self-Defense campaign is ultimately designed to give community members the tools to develop healthy communities that are safe spaces for all people, not a select few. Simply pointing at the problem will not cause it to change; instead strategic coalition building and intersectional approaches will be the proving ground for our collective to stop street harassment. The moment is ripe for collaboration and growth, but only if we can see the common harms and develop diverse responses to them.  

*One of the first things I ever learned in organizing and doing work was “don’t do analogs.” While this is good advice, in some cases analogs are essential to creating buy-in from those who may not always see the “relevance” of a social problem. Admittedly there are differences between the two, but as an organizer I’m more interested in getting people to see the common ground so we can develop diverse solutions to these problems.

– Dr. L’Heureux Dumi Lewis, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the City College of New York

This post is part of the weekly blog series by male allies. We need men involved in the work to end the social acceptability of street harassment and to stop the practice, period. If you’d like to contribute to this weekly series, please contact me.

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“We were told we should not be out at that time of night”

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My Girlfriend and I (we’re lesbian) were walking down the street at midnight in Swansea on a Saturday evening, a male in a car propositions us for sex and makes comments about my legs. in the end I tell him to F**CK off, he then follows us into a car park where my car was park. He only retreats when he sees and hears me call the police.

The police were not one bit interested. In fact we were told we should not be out at that time of night as if it was OUR fault! knowing a bit about how to defend myself as well as my rights, as well as what the police should really be doing I challenged him, he then backtracked and claimed that was his personal opinion.

After complaints to the police, who were still not interested, my persistence and help from my AM Edwina Hart the offender was finally given a warning.

A few weeks later we saw two police officers in a van around about the same location leering at us.. Male police officers are as bad as anyone. Just check out the number of warnings and arrests for prostitution and then the number of men warned or prosecuted for soliciting women for sex… tells you all you want to know about South Wales Police.

– Anonymous

Location: Swansea High Street, South Wales, United Kingdom

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Find suggestions for what YOU can do about this human rights issue.

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