Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
I got off the railway station at 10.30 at night and I was walking towards my home which is hardly 2 minutes from the railway station. A group of young men on the road made me feel very unsafe and scared because they made a vulgar gesture at me and tried to block my path with a bike. There were not many people around and i panicked, but I just walked past with a confidence i didn’t feel inside, ignoring the cigarette smoke that they blew into my face.
-Anonymous
I got off the railway station at 10.30 at night and I was walking towards my home which is hardly 2 minutes from the railway station. A group of young men on the road made me feel very unsafe and scared because they made a vulgar gesture at me and tried to block my path with a bike. There were not many people around and i panicked, but I just walked past with a confidence i didn’t feel inside, ignoring the cigarette smoke that they blew into my face.
-Anonymous
When serious street harassment and assault occurs, it’d be nice to think we can call the cops or run and find an officer to help. I can recall about a dozen or so people whose stories I’ve read who have asked for help from cops and they’ve found responses to be mixed, from hearing “what do you expect” to complete indifference to concern to receiving active help in trying to catch the perpetrator. So the (unsurprising) lesson I take away is there’s a chance you’ll get the help you need and there’s a chance you won’t (so we need to educate cops and hold them responsible for helping so that the chances of getting help improve)!
In this context, the following story caught my eye because it shows the kind of luck you may have if you approach a cop in NYC for help with a street harasser. Via Gothamist:
“Greenpoint resident Chrissie Brodigan says she was riding on the L train between Bedford and First Avenue when her pug, who has health problems, overheated and began vomiting in the tote bag she was carrying him in. As she was leaving the subway station with the dog in her arms, she says a police officer’s attempt to issue her a ticket turned ugly, and when she became upset the cop began saying, “If you’re going to act like a woman I’m going to treat you like a woman.”
[In a second article, Gothamist reports witness Jason Wagner said the officer told her, “Do you wanna talk like a woman? Do you wanna get knocked around like a woman?”]
According to Brodigan, the arresting officer’s name is Witriol (badge number 942838). After seeing a photo, she identified him to us as Joel Witriol, who in 2006 became New York’s first Hasidic cop. Brodigan, 32, says Witriol would not accept her explanation that she was carrying the pug because it was sick, and she believes that the disturbed crowd that gathered to witness the arrest only made him angrier. She tells us, “He punched me in the back (there are bruises), he handcuffed me, and in the scuffle grabbed my breasts and pinched them.”
Melissa Randazzo, a speech language pathologist who lives in Williamsburg, witnessed the arrest and tells us, “something about it seemed very wrong. The cop’s tone seemed really inappropriate and he kept saying things like, ‘Are you going to act like a woman?’ She tried to walk away, and then he grabbed her and pushed her against the wall outside the turnstile.” Randazzo ran up to the street level to call 911 to, as she says, “call the cops” on Witriol, and soon some 20 officers had descended into the Bedford station. They then ordered the witnesses to disperse.”
Brodigan was arrested, handcuffed and jailed and the cops threatened to take her dog to the pound to be put down. She received three tickets for failing to produce ID, disorderly conduct, and failing to have dog in a container. When she was released she asked for a pen to write down their badge numbers but they refused. They did return her pug.
The New York Post printed a similar story, though it says one witness claims Brodigan made anti-Semitic insults to the officer, however, other witnesses and Brodigan deny this. Hopefully this is untrue, but even if it was, would it justify physically harming her?
On the other hand, no one denies that the officer spewed misogynistic filth or that he left bruises on her body. It’s quite chilling for women to realize there are men with these attitudes out there who are supposed to be “protecting” us from harassers, but in reality, they are harassers too, just with badges and authority.
Wow, I accidentally came across articles which are each called some variation of “How to Talk to Girls on the Street.” I’m going on the assumption that these are real articles… From one of them:
“…One of the most challenging things for men in the dating scene is approaching women on the street. Like any learned skill the more you practice approaching women the better you will get. So the easy solution in learning how to talk to women on the street is to simply approach more of them. But this is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes you might be walking in one direction and she is walking opposite and toward you. It can be very awkward because she’s going one way and you’re going the other way so it’s not very natural to just walk up and say something. Or is it? The reality is that you can approach anyone, anywhere, and virtually at any time…”
A friendly smile or hello from a stranger of any sex can often lift someone’s spirits. I also recognize that strangers can and do meet in public and form relationships, be they one night stands or lifetime commitments. What bothers me about these articles is the assumption that any girl/woman (preferably attractive, right?) on the street who is not already with a man is publicly available for a man’s attention and he is free to approach any and all of them if he just gets up the courage and learns how to do it well.
I’m reading Sue Wise & Liz Stanley’s book Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Everyday Life (published in 1987) and something I read today relates exactly to these articles.
“As marriage is taken to indicate a woman’s perpetual sexual consent to the desires of her husband [when this was written rape was still legal within marriage in many places], so womanhood is taken to indicate a woman’s perpetual consent to the attentions of whatever man: unless a particular man owns the property in question it’s taken to be public property” (Stanley and Wise, 176).
Let me try to explain further why I see these articles as being misguided.
Raise your hand if you mostly are harassed when you are alone or with female friends! In my informal, anonymous survey I conducted last fall, female respondents said they were harassed the most when they were #1 alone and #2 when they were with female friends. The absence of men seems to imply women are sexually available and just dying to be approached on the street. I’ve learned from several women’s stories that wearing a wedding ring or being with one’s children doesn’t always prevent harassment either because the men who “own” the women and/or children aren’t actually present.
Side but related note: I’ve found that when men do harass women who are with other men, it’s often directed at the man about how lucky he is to be with a hot woman, or something along those lines. This even happened to me two years ago when I was out with my boyfriend and a man started talking to him about me like I was a car he was admiring. We were both stunned.
The men writing and reading the articles don’t seem to care to take into account that – depending on the time of day – most women are out in public because they are traveling to/from work or school or stores or out getting exercise or walking a dog and they have no interest whatsoever in being detained by men testing out pick-up lines or trying to improve their game or improve their confidence at approaching women by “hitting” on them. No matter what their reason for being in public, many women who are not looking for a new romantic or sexual relationship are not going to be interested in having men approach them this way. These articles also assume that all women are heterosexual; what about women who only date women? They really don’t want to be approached by men in a sexual way. And the articles don’t adequately address how unnerving, scary, or annoying it can be to be approached by unknown men in public, particularly in isolated areas or at night.
So these men would be better off following advice like this on how to talk to girls/women on the street:
1. Don’t assume a girl or woman is single, heterosexual, and/or interested in being “hit on” or picked up just because she’s in public.
2. Instead of whistling, honking, touching, or saying something about the way she looks as a way of saying hi, treat her like a normal human being and actually say hello and smile or nod.
3. If you want to engage her in conversation, see #2. If she says hello back and doesn’t hurry away or look away, then you can try to politely and respectfully start a conversation about something inoffensive and preferably not about her body parts. Take cues from her whether to continue the conversation. If she looks busy, distracted, or nervous, leave her alone! She may not have the time or inclination to talk. Or you may be the third or fourth man to approach her that day – even if it’s done politely this is wearisome and annoying. Don’t be rude if she doesn’t talk to you. You don’t know her personal history or what’s on her mind or her schedule. Be respectful of her as a human. Don’t force her to be rude to you in order to get you to leave her alone.
4. Never approach her in an isolated area or at night because that makes most women nervous or scared.
What’s your advice to men who want to talk to girls/women on the street?
There is a problem in the Hispanic Male community. I don’t want this to sound racist, and I apologize if it does. I moved recently from Lincoln Square (North side of Chicago) to Albany Park (2 miles west) and am now in a neighborhood that is a large percentage Hispanic. I want to point out that most of the people are very friendly and I like them. However, since it has gotten warm outside, I have been catcalled, harassed, and followed by men in cars at least once a week.
This has never happened to me before in my life and I am 32 years old and have lived on the North Side of Chicago for over 10 years. The men are always Latino. There is no other explanation other than culture for why this has started happening all of the sudden to me.
To those in the Hispanic/Latino community who care about this issue – PLEASE, teach your boys that it is NOT ok to harass women like they’re meat on the street? There is something wrong with a culture that teaches men that is acceptable.
-Laura
Location: Albany Park, Chicago, Illinois
(Submit your stories here)
[Editor’s note: While I have a policy against racism, I chose to post her submission as she sent it because I did not feel her experiences or opinions were voiced in a malicious or hateful way. Race does play a role in much of gender-based public harassment, especially in the U.S. where race means many things to different people, and so I think it’s important to have dialogue on the issue if it’s done with the purpose of learning and addressing the problem and not being racist. Please see my related post on “piropos” for more about street harassment in Hispanic culture.
But I will note, men of all races harass women of all races and really, American culture teaches men this is acceptable just as much as any other. Just read comments from American men and some women when mainstream news or blogs cover catcalling or more benign forms of street harassment. Inevitably some of the commenters declare the behavior is flattering and men’s right and women ask for it by the way they dress and women overreact and blah blah blah.]