Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Hollaback UK!

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Yay! Joining the newly launched Hollaback Savannah is another anti-street harassment website, fresh off the press today – Hollaback UK! Check out their site and if you live in the UK, send them your harassment stories.

Personally, having lived in the UK for a year when I studied abroad in college, I can attest to the problem of street harassment there. For example, one day when I was going running through an average neighborhood in Lancaster (north of Manchester, near the Lake District) I experienced my worse verbal harassment ever by a large group of guys near my age.  It felt like verbal rape and I was shaken and upset for hours after it happened. I can’t even bring myself to repeat what was said 🙁

Also, when I was analyzing anti-street harassment websites for my master’s thesis in 2007, there was one called the Anti-Street Harassment UK site that I really liked. They had a place to share stories but they also offered resources and strategies for dealing with it. They’re gone now and I’m not sure why. To my knowledge, no other anti-street harassment website is running in the UK, so, there’s a great need for Hollaback UK!

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New Pink Taxis for Women in Mexico

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Image from the AP
Image from the AP

Women living in the Mexican city Pueblo can now opt to take a taxi driven by a woman. Pink Taxi de Puebla is for women-only passengers and caters to those “tired of leering male drivers.”   Via the AP:

“Some of the woman who have been on board tell us how male taxi drivers cross the line and try to flirt with them and make inappropriate propositions,” said taxi driver Aida Santos, who drives one of the compact, four-door taxis with a tracking device and an alarm button that notifies emergency services. “In the Pink Taxi they won’t have that feeling of insecurity, and they feel more relaxed.”

The fleet of 35 taxis each have GPS, an alarm button and … a beauty kit (?!).

This company is part of a growing trend of women for women taxis cropping up around the globe. In July, one launched in Beirut, Lebanon, and similar services already exist in England, Russia, Australia, Iran, India, and the United Arab Emirates. (Don’t get me started on women-only subway cars and buses…)

The article talks about how the business offers a lucrative job to the women drivers, which is good. But, like with all women-only forms of public transportation, segregation does not mean equality. Women-only public transportation does not stop the men who leer at or harass women who cannot find a woman-driven taxi or need to get somewhere at a time when the women-only buses or subway cars aren’t running (or when they’re already full).  It does not stop men harass women in other public spaces.

It’s easier to make something pink and tell women it will keep them safe if they use it than it is to actually address the problem, and, given the rising trend of women-only services like the one in Mexico, unfortuantely easy is the way many governments and businesses are choosing to go.

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“Hey baby” line in Jamestown, NY

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I was walking out of the Wilson Farms parking lot when an older guy yelled “Hey baby,” then followed me for 2 blocks.

– Claire

Location: Jamestown, NY, USA, corner of Main and 6th

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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Feeling trapped and furious

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Several times a month while walking down the street in Paris, men would call out or walk alongside me to tell me how pretty I was, men who wanted me to get coffee with them or to strike up a conversation, or who asked for my phone number. In one circumstance, I was late for work and almost running to get to the metro station when a man partially blocked my way and asked me where I was going and whether I wanted to go anywhere with him. I was furious that although I was so clearly not in the mood to stop for a chat, apparently this act of calling attention to myself in public made this man feel like it was appropriate to approach me. And I resented the arrogance of privilege that made him think that his desire to talk to me was more important than my need to get where I was going. After each time it happened – and I had never been stopped on the street like that before Paris, when I lived in a smaller town in Virginia – I felt shaken, my personal space violated.

The people who stopped me (other than to ask for directions) were all male and mostly young. What struck me the most is that they always seemed to intend to project friendliness (although the effect was the opposite), and all seemed convinced that I might be receptive to their advances, although I gave absolutely no signal that I might want to talk. Every man who approached me also seemed to be a migrant from North or Subsaharan Africa, and I’ve since thought that perhaps cultural differences in signals of women’s availability or in where it’s acceptable to strike up conversation could account for some of it, rather than malicious intent.

But it’s important for me to say that, no matter what their motives might have been, what matters is the effect they had on me. I always felt angry, disrespected, like some of my agency had been taken away. I was offended by the implication that I would agree to do anything with a guy who so clearly just wanted my body, who didn’t know anything about my personality or interests. I began to feel a little less secure when walking in public. I was never really afraid of violence during the daytime, but being forced to interact with someone just because I happened to be in public, being forced either to break social conventions by being rude or to give someone access to myself that I definitely didn’t want him to have, made me feel trapped and furious.

– Lenore

Location: Paris, France

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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The ugly side of masculinity

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One week ago in New York  City two men approached Jack Price, an openly-gay man, on College Point Blvd while Price was walking home from a deli. The men allegedly called Price anti-gay slurs and beat him. Price escaped, called 911, and is still in the hospital recovering from a fractured jaw and ribs, the collapse of both of his lungs and a lacerated spleen. What the hell!  As of two days ago, both suspected men have been arrested.

At a press conference a few days ago, Council speaker Christine Quinn said,

“news of the attack ‘smacked particularly sharply’ after returning from the National Equality March on Washington the day before, energized and optimistic about equality for the LGBT community.

‘You grow tired of having to do these press conferences, of having to stand up and decry a hate crime against someone because they are perceived to be gay or because of their race or their religion,’ Quinn said.

She continued, this ‘violent, outrageous and unacceptable hate crime’ and others like it ‘rip at the fabric of our decent society’ and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

There have been a string of violent hate crimes and murders  against gay men and transgender women in New York, and the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reports that hate crimes in the U.S. are at the highest point in a decade.

If you’re in New York, tomorrow, come out for an event organized in response to the Price beating and to rally against hate crimes in general. Saturday, October 17, at 2 p.m. there will be a march on College Park Blvd, starting at 20th Ave, and a rally in the park on 14th Ave, organized by a coalition of LGBQ groups.

Hate crimes against members of the LGBQTI community are often related to gender-based street harassment (and overlap when female members of the LGBQTI community are targeted for both their sex and sexual orientation). In particular, some of the underlying reasons both forms of harassment occur are the same.

For example, men (I can’t recall the last time I heard about a violent hate crime committed by a woman) who commit the crimes may be doing so to try to prove their masculinity (when it’s read as aggression and violence) or to perform masculinity for other men. The latter is especially true when men harass and assault in pairs or groups, as was the case when the two men beat Price.

Another example why men may engage in hate crimes is to punish members of the LGBQTI community for not acting according to the gender the perpetrator thinks they should and therefore for threatening the perpetrator’s narrow definitions of masculinity and femininity.

Similarly, perpetrators of some forms of gender-based street harassment engage in their actions to punish women for not acting the way the men think they should act given narrow definitions of masculinity/femininity (read: superior/inferior). Maybe the woman is alone in public instead of at home (so the men think it’s okay to comment and touch her; “if she didn’t want that to happen she should stay at home”), or maybe she doesn’t meet the idealized beauty standards (making it a-okay to call someone a fat cow for not being skinny – not), or maybe she dared to wear flattering clothing (so the men think, “I’ll show that slut who’s in charge”).

So to cut down on both hate crimes and gender-based street harassment and assault, we need to work on changing the definition of masculinity and pass laws and engage in activism that deters and punishes men who hurt others in an attempt to prove their own masculinity or in an attempt to punish the victim/s for not adhering to strict “traditional” gender norms. Thoughts?

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