Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Help Bring RightRides to Washington DC!

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(Cross-posted from HollaBack DC)

How much would you love to see safe, free rides for women and LGBTQ  individuals on weekends through a partnership with Holla Back DC! and Zipcar?  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Well, we want to bring a  RightRides chapter to the DC metro area.

To make this a reality, Holla Back DC! is asking you to vote for this idea through Ideablob.  If we win, half of that $10K would be used to bring RightRides to DC.  But we need YOU to make it happen! We urge you to take one minute to register through Ideablob and vote for HBDC!  A vote for us is a vote for a safer DC for all.  And hey, good ideas spread, so get your friends and family in other places to vote to make our nation’s capital a safe place!

Read about our plans, register, vote, and spread the word.

As always, a heartfelt thank you for your votes and continued support.  Holla Back DC! is a community initiative that would not be possible without the loving support from people like you and the DC metro community.

Alright, off our PBS soap box. :)

– Holla Back DC

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The real question is why do men street harass?

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“Why Do Men Catcall?” is an article currently on Alternet.org’s homepage.  The topic of why men harass and abuse women makes me mad – just ask my male partner how I behaved toward him during the week when I was writing my chapter on why men street harass women. I’ll save you the trouble and answer: I was a ball of rage generally and toward him if he did anything that hinted of male privilege – so I’m not going to get too into this.

I do quickly want to point out something I wrote in my comment on the story that I think the author misses: regardless of whether men mean catcalls as compliments or not, the act of intruding on a woman’s space to offer an evaluative comment or noise (positive or negative) demonstrates a sense of entitlement and that they think it’s their RIGHT as men to do so.

It’s the kind of entitlement that some abled bodied people may show toward persons with disabilities (ie believing they can push them out of the way if they’re in a wheelchair) or some white people may show toward persons of color (how many African American women have had white people think it’s okay to touch their hair?). Again, a lack of respect by the person intruding comes into play.

If men really wanted to compliment a woman or meet a woman, they would say hello in a respectful, non threatening way etc and as they got to know her, they’d offer her a real compliment, not just something vulgar like “nice ass.” See Shapely Prose’s excellent guest post on this topic.

My last point –  from my research, I’ve found that most women have experienced a scary form of street harassment, such as men stalking, touching, or assaulting them. Why do people who write these types of articles never focus on that reality and why men engage in those behaviors? Instead they always focus on the “hey baby”‘s. They’re related and, really, the conversation should be about all forms of gender-based public harassment and assault, but my problem is that the only conversations I see outside of feminist sites about street harassment only focus on catcalls and whether or not they’re compliments.  It detracts from the larger and more complex experiences women have in public because they’re female.

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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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“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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