Emma Rachel Deane, UK, SSH Blog Correspondent
For anyone who follows events surrounding women’s public safety, her story was impossible to miss. Towards the end of April this year, Poppy Smart, a 23-year-old digital marketing coordinator in the UK, had reached her limit on the amount of harassment she could bear from the staff of a nearby construction site. After seeking help from a nearby police station to put a stop to it, a local newspaper ran a front page story identifying Smart by name and stating that wolf-whistling builders were facing an investigation after her complaints.
Within days of the article’s publication every major newspaper in the UK had reported the story, her social media accounts were flooded with messages and the hashtag “#PoppySmart” was created for twitter uses to vent their anger at Smart for her actions. I interviewed her to hear about it from her.
“It was a really difficult week, I’m still in Worcester and a lot of people here got very angry about the whole thing,” Smart said. “I’ve been told what was being said about me online, but I don’t really want to look at it… I’m still concerned about how extreme some of the reactions were. I still think about it quite a lot.”
Extreme is right. In the interest of not allowing a breathing space for misogynistic Twitter rants, I won’t display any of the #PoppySmart commentary in this post. Suffice to say, it was painfully clear that many people had judged her actions to be disproportionate to the situation and an unworthy use of police time.
Not content to just condemn her actions, many Twitter users vilified Smart on a personal level, publicly attacking every aspect of her persona, from her appearance to assumptions about her sexuality and lifestyle to basic derogatory name calling and abuse. The most noticeable, and perhaps most problematic aspect of the whole saga, is the incredibly uninformed and reactive nature of each headline-fueled “anti-Poppy” tweet. Instant judgements were made from click-baiting headlines which were designed specifically to provoke a negative reaction, causing her experiences to be dismissed and her actions casually criticised without any real insight into the situation.
In Smart’s case, the information lost from the headlines was that she had endured embarrassing and lewd comments about her body from a group of around 10 construction workers for almost a month while trying to control an anxiety disorder which had worsened following a physical attack by an intoxicated male last year. Her harassment from the construction site turned to intimidation when one of the men stepped in front of her and sneeringly blocked her path to work, an act one would struggle to find any purpose or meaning in other than a display of physical strength and ownership. Given her past ordeal and daily struggle with her own mental well-being, she had reached breaking point.
In addition to missing out vital information many media outlets also embellished Smart’s actions to an incredibly unfair degree. “To read the headlines you’d think I’d dialed 999 the first time it happened,” she told me.
Judging by the social media furor, it appears as though that’s exactly what readers did think. In fact the people dealing with her complaint were not even police, but voluntary community support officers, a far cry from the “police probe” reported by many publications. Even media outlets Smart was led to believe she could trust misrepresented her experiences.
“I read the BBC newsbeat article online and even though they actually spoke to me for the piece, they still chose to call my harassment ‘wolf-whistling’ in the headline, which really trivialised what I was going through. They didn’t mention the lewd catcalls, or the man who had invaded my personal space. When I spoke to the journalist I was under the impression that the article would get across the fact that wolf-whistling wasn’t the issue.”
Some news sources even began claiming that Smith had likened her experiences to racial discrimination. “My family was concerned it would ruin my reputation. I wouldn’t compare my harassment to any other forms of bigotry, each is a separate issue. What I said was that we don’t have national debates about whether it’s okay to yell at people in the street on the basis of their skin colour or religious dress so I don’t understand why we were having one about unsolicited comments on women’s bodies. They did it to get people riled up so they had another week’s worth of news.”
In addition to the careless representation of her experiences, The Daily Mail and The Sun ran opinion columns suggesting that women intimidated by lewd catcalls were somehow weaker than women who were accepting of it. In addition, The Sun took the already dismal situation a step further, almost praising Smart’s harassers for their actions. They claimed a recent study showed that “54% of women love being wolf-whistled” and that “objecting to wolf-whistling is a sexist double standard” because some women “publicly perv over David Beckham’s pants ads.” A story about an elderly couple, neither of whom “would have been born if it wasn’t for catcalling” was also printed under those statements.
Most news sources also pulled photos from Smart’s social media pages without permission before she had a chance to make them private. “The photos pulled were selfies, and because of that people were saying I was vain and that I must have been enjoying the attention. People were saying I was asking for it. I think it should have been a faceless story, how I look is irrelevant, I still shouldn’t be be subjected to harassment. They focused too much on me personally and set the stage for people to attack me on a national scale.”
The language used in articles and phrased for headlines is not accidental. It is carefully considered and exists purely to pull a reader into a story, causing a newspaper to be bought or a link to be clicked containing valuable advertising revenue. Once that button has been pressed it needs to deliver information to the reader as fast and sensationally as possible so that it warrants being shared on social media for another person to click and so on. It would be beyond naive, for example, to believe that news sources would be blind to the effect of choosing her selfie in a low-cut top to accompany a story about her complaints regarding lewd comments on her body.
I’m not suggesting that the people raging about Smart’s actions are helpless victims of media brainwashing, there is clearly a lot of ingrained misogyny there, but it seems undeniable that the reporting surrounding her story was designed to provoke the very worst reaction from people with no regard for her personal safety or well-being. Aside from the obvious oversimplification and embellishment of her experiences, it’s certainly worth noting the familiar shift to the masculine perspective. We see headlines such as “Builders Face Police Probe” instead of “Woman Faces Harassment.” We see countless comments arguing that Smart should have just asked her boyfriend/brother/dad to “sort it out” instead of questioning a culture in which her voice alone isn’t as powerful.
Far be it from Smart to dwell on the negatives, she is currently planning to collaborate with a technology enterprise in the hopes of developing an app to enable women to report places in which they have felt unsafe, allowing police to identify hotspots. “I’m worried that other women will see what happened to me and feel like they can’t speak out about their experiences, but I really hope that’s not the case. I would do it all over again. People have the right to seek help when they don’t feel safe. The more we report it the clearer it is that it happens so frequently. So many people contacted me to tell me it happens to them every day.”
You can follow her blog here.
Emma Rachel Deane is a London-based retail manager for a fast growing women’s lifestyle brand and an outspoken advocate for women’s social justice issues. She can be found blogging on Raging Hag or tweeting @emmaracheldeane.
