Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

700 anti-violence posters pasted throughout Kabul, Afghanistan

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These two blog entries are cross-posted with permission from the blog of Young Women for Change, a women’s rights group in Afghanistan:

Posting Our Voices on the City Walls

Friday, December 23, 2011, Young Women for Change (YWC) filled the streets of Kabul with posters about women rights messages.  It was another day of history, for the first time Kabul streets have seen women rights posters posted by Afghan men and women. We started poster advocacy from our Facebook page and website. Later, we decided to post it on the Kabul streets walls so it reaches every Afghan that crosses those streets.

I, like any other YWC member, was nervous about it, but as we moved through the city I felt stronger. It was rewarding when school students and every person on the street would read it, if they couldn’t read it, they would ask others to read it for them. After reading poster on the wall people would ask us to post posters on their cars.

I felt like my heart was going to melt down when we posted a poster and a shopkeeper who was there watching us posted it, couldn’t read it, and asked other person to read it. When he learned what the poster said, he started fixing the poster and glued it harder on the wall. Two policemen walked to the other side of the road to read our posters.

Others thought we were working for money and belonged to a foreign organization, without knowing the fact that we are an Afghan group and this project is funded by individual Afghans.  Maybe there are not to blame. We, youth, have not had much of ground level work and in the media, youth complain about what the government or others have not done instead of talking about what we can do.

The poster day was an example of how and with whom YWC wants to work. We want to reach every Afghan individually and work with them to change the stereotypes and bring the positive change to our country, ourselves. It is time we realized our responsibilities.

— By Anita Hadiary, YWC Co-Founder, 20

One Step Closer

The poster initiative began on Young Women for Change’s Facebook pages. Every week, we would post a poster about violence, street harassment or other forms of gender-based discrimination online. There would be debates on them. Many times, followers of our page would get into heated discussions with other Afghans who were favorable towards violence against women or practiced victim-blaming. The debates would reach to one hundred or more comments and tens of people would share the posters to their own Facebook pages or groups. It was striking how there were people among the so-called “educated people,” who had access to internet, and argued that it was somehow okay to beat a woman or disrespect her on the pretext of her clothing. At one point, a Kabul University student wrote, “my mother has her own place, but if my wife ever dares to disobey me, she will not be safe in my house.” Shocked, we shared the comment with others, and many women and men raised their voices to condemn it.

The amount of ignorance and misogyny we witnessed among the small percentage of people who had access to the internet and claimed to be intellectuals and educated, led us to believe in the need to do more advocacy in Kabul. To do this, we used our own money to print out posters, created some glue using ground wood and walked to the streets to post our views on the walls of Kabul city.

Today, about twenty five people, men and women, got together to glue 700 posters about violence against women and education for women on their city’s walls. Members of Young Women for Change and YWC Male Advocacy team led the initiative. A few members of other youth organizations, like Hadia and Afghan Intellectuals Network, also joined as we exited our modest office at around 11:00am. Four people had volunteered to give us their cars for transportation during the poster event. Ice was still shinning underneath our feet as we walked to the cars, divided up posters, brushes and glue among the groups and drove towards Sakhi Shrine in Karte Sakhi.

It was crowded there. Shopkeepers, laborer children who attempted to sell us gum or Bolany, a delicious Afghan dumpling, and women who had visited the shrine gathered around us as we organized and decided which areas to cover. We divided into four groups and each group hit one corner. Soon, one or two posters could be seen at the beginning of every street.

My team and I went to the front door of the shrine. We approached a shopkeeper to ask permission to post one of the posters on his wall.

– “What is this?” he asked me.

– “It is a poster about violence against women.”

– “I am against women. Don’t put this one on my walls. A man is a man. If he is angry, he beats. That is what men do. I am against this,” he said angrily.

I smiled with sadness and tried to convince him to give me permission to at-least glue the poster about education to his wall. I kept forcing myself to smile at him. My mother had warned me earlier in the day, that during the poster project I should keep my cool. “If you laugh about things, they will laugh too and eventually they will agree. If you are serious, they get angry more quickly thinking you are criticizing them,” she had said.

-“Let me study. Only one out of ten Afghan girls graduates high school,” I read the poster to him.

-“It is still about women,” he said.

– “It is about little girls. They need education otherwise our country will never be build,” I said with a smile. He shook his head reluctantly. My colleagues and I glued the poster to his wall.

Often, many we meet tell us we should do this sort of thing out of Kabul because people in Kabul are more educated and aware, but our conversations and encounters usually prove this statement wrong. Even in Kabul, the level of acceptance of a woman as an equal human is low. This encounter and many others during the day made us more confident that what we were doing is essential.

We went to Karte Char, Makrooyan, Taimani, Shahre Naw, Qalaye Fatullah and Khushal Khan Meena and we met many men and women who showed interest in our work, in addition to the ones who would oppose us. In Qalaye Fatullah, several laborer children gathered around a poster about early marriage and tried to read the poster to each other. Then, they ran over to the cars they were washing and told more kids about the posters. An old illiterate man, who polished shoes in Taimani, asked his friend to read it to him. Later, we saw him fixing the glue to save the poster from falling to the ground.

From the children who practiced reading with our posters, to older men and women who helped us and even to the men who argued with us and said that they did not want the posters, the hundreds of people we met and spoke with on Friday motivated us and gave us more energy. The reality that twenty-five Afghan women and men sacrificed their Friday, a weekend day, donated their money and resources and even endangered their safety to raise awareness among their people was another example of how Young Women for Change inspires Afghan youth to unite for creating a better Afghanistan.

– By Noorjahan Akbar, YWC Co-Founder, 20

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Five Country Study on Women’s Safety in Cities

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Nepali Women conduct a safety walk

“I carry safety pins with me while travelling. Whenever I feel that I am being harassed by someone around me, I poke him with my safety pin. It alerts the person who is conducting such violence on me. I was taught to do it by seniors in my college. I was hesitant to do it at first, but I found that when my friends did it, the person who harasses tends to back off. So that gave me confidence to use it by myself as well. .. ” – A college student in Nepal

“A woman I know felt safe in this community because of the [gangsters/traffickers] who took care of the community, who watched over everything that happened. But that only gives you security when they don’t have their eye on you [i.e., want to date you]…the man who watched over the entrance to the community one day decided he wanted to go out with her, and he told her to go get dressed up to go out the next day at 7 p.m. If she didn’t go out with him, he was going to kill her children and husband. She didn’t have a choice.” – A woman in Brazil

“When we [are] leaving factory, there are crowd[s] and gangsters often come to touch women’s bottoms and they laugh and feel it’s normal. There have also been instances where workers were sexually assaulted by gangsters during daylight hours.” – A garment factory worker in Cambodia

How safe are public places for women who work in factories in Cambodia, for university students in Liberia, for street vendors in Ethiopia, for women commuters in Nepal, and for women in Brazil?

The NGO ActionAid conducted a participatory study to find out the answer. Through using safety audits, focus groups, and mapping, groups of women discussed and showed what about their cities make them feel insecure. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of reasons why they felt unsafe, including personal experiences of harassment or assault, wariness of local drug traffickers, and poorly lit roads.

The findings from the study and the recommendations for making cities safer for women are available in the fascinating report Women and the City: Examining the gender impact of violence and urbanisation.

I highly recommend reading the report as it provides an in-depth slice of information about five demographics of women in five different countries and because the study was conducted and written in such a way that the women were able to share their stories and speak for themselves.

Through email correspondences, the report author Alice Taylor told me why she thinks the study is important:

“I think it’s crucial to look at issues of how cities are developed and are growing — in ways that are equal and unequal to their citizens — and violence against women together, to see how different kinds of risk factors intersect to influence women’s lives.”

She also spoke to its challenges:

“It was challenging to analyze and bring together such different contexts and approaches into one report, but it demonstrated how prevalent forms of insecurity are for women across urban settings.”

And she shared three findings that stuck out to her the most from her process of writing the report:

“First, the ways in which women constantly have to calculate and avoid routes in their own cities – that was universal.

Second, the finding about the popularity of mapping, which I think holds a lot of promise as a community-based and participatory approach as well as a powerful advocacy tool.

Third, I think there’s a lot to develop in the future in terms of ethics and “do no harm” when doing research on women’s urban safety, as well as monitoring and evaluation to understand what works.

After the five country profiles, the report concludes with six recommendations for making cities safer for women (starting on page 61):

1.      Raise awareness of the problem

2.      Build government commitment

3.      Change social norms for prevention

4.      Build institutional capacity to address the problem

5.      Strengthen networks for advocacy

6.      Conduct research for evidence-based programmes and policies.

Their recommendations aligned closely with the ones I wrote in my book (e.g. raising awareness, changing social norms, and conducting research).

In conclusion, Taylor offers her thoughts on where further research is necessary:

“I think a big question out there, is to further articulate gender analysis around urban safety: which types urban violence/ insecurity are particularly dangerous for women (i.e., poor men experience higher murder rates and are also greatly affected by poverty), why, and what interventions can be designed.”

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“Systematic sexual violence against women in Egypt”

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12/20/11 update, from the New York Times:

“Thousands of woman marched through downtown Cairo on Tuesday evening to call for the end of military rule in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking a female demonstrator on the pavement of Tahrir Square….

The event may have been the biggest women’s demonstration in Egypt’s history, and the most significant since a 1919 march led by pioneering Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi to protest British rule. The scale was stunning, and utterly unexpected in this strictly patriarchal society. Previous attempts to organize women’s events in Tahrir Square this year have either fizzled or, in at least one case, ended in the physical harassment of the handful of women who did turn out.”

Marvelous.

Image via Al-Jazeera

Visit the website HarassMap or follow the hashtag #EndSH on Twitter and you’ll find documentation of street harassment and sexual assault in Cairo, including Tahrir Square.

Journalist Mona Eltahawy is outspoken about this atrocity, and last month she brought attention to the sexual assault she and other female journalists experienced while covering protests at Tahrir Square.

Today on CNN, Eltahawy spoke about the brutality of the Egyptian military against protesters. She brought attention to the treatment of women in particular (especially the woman dubbed “Blue Bra Girl“):

“…I hope she survived…I hope she is able to recover… I cannot even begin to imagine what she went through…what this woman went through is incredible on so many levels. I salute her first of all for her courage in being there. And second of all, I think what she does, and especially this picture you are seeing right now, is it exposes once and for all and kills any denial about the Egyptian regime whether it was under Mubarak and now under the military and the use of systematic sexual violence against women in Egypt. It is a shame, it has been denied for too long and we must expose it at every level. And unfortunately, her tragic case has allowed us to do that very publicly…”

As many others have said before, there can be no true revolution until the sexual harassment and violence against women ends.

Update: Eltahawy just spoke to the BBC, too.

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Street harassment role reversal in Lebanon

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Last week, as part of the Adventures of Salwa anti-sexual harassment campaign, two trucks drove the streets of Beirut, Lebanon, and on the loudspeakers, they played recordings of women’s voices, harassing passersby. They also played messages about how street harassment is not okay.

This video clip captures what happened and you can see/hear people’s reactions to the truck and the campaign. Most of the video clip is in French, but there is about a minute where one of the campaign organizers speaks about the initiative in English.

How do you think a similar initiative would be received in your community?

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“I drew this comic in order to cope with street harassment”

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“I drew this comic in order to cope with the street harassment I face nearly every day. This Thanksgiving was surprisingly bad. Unfortunately, one of my male coworkers told me, ‘Either you have really bad luck or your perception about what’s really happening is confused.’

I hope that sharing my experience will prevent other women from doubting what we already know to be true: it’s not our luck that causes harassment and we’re not confused.”

Liz Rush identifies as a radical feminist, an immigrant, and a pedestrian. She is currently working on a collection of comic short stories and keeps a graphic diary about her experiences in Spain called Sin Hemingway.

“How was the walk?”

“Don’t touch me. Leave me alone.”

“Whore.”

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