women's equality day Archives | Stop Street Harassment

Women’s Equality Day: Share Your Story

August 26, 2013 By HKearl

Today is Women’s Equality Day and while we’ve come a long way since women gained the right to vote in the USA in 1920, there is still so far to go since sexism and gender violence are very real issues.

Help bring attention to the issue of street harassment by sharing your story with CNN via their iReport assignment.

I shared mine and then linked my story and the issue to Women’s Equality Day.

Street harassment is a global problem. Studies show that more than 90% of women in countries like Egypt, India, Yemen, and the USA experience it. More than 80% do in Canada. A recent study in France found that 25% of women ages 18-29 feel scared when they walk down the streets. In London, 43% of women ages 18-34 had experienced street harassment just during the prior year.

If you add to that the thousands of stories women have shared on my blog Stop Street Harassment, on the Hollaback! sites, and through the The Everyday Sexism Project, as well as the stories they share on personal blogs, Tumblrs and other social media sites, you can see that this is a huge problem.

Repeated street harassment and severe forms of it cause many women emotional distress and significantly impact their lives, including prompting them to avoid going places alone, to change routes and routines, and even to move neighborhoods or quit jobs.

I’ve seen this over and over through the stories shared on my blog Stop Street Harassment. There was the woman in Kansas who considered dropping out of her PhD program because she was routinely harassed by men near her campus; a woman in Mississippi who quit her job at a retail store because male customers began following her to her car after her shift; and a woman in California who was harassed so many times while she waited for a bus to campus that she finally went home, feeling upset and powerless, and missed the class.

Most telling is how unsafe street harassment makes women feel. Gallup data from surveys conducted in 143 countries in 2011 show that in every single county, women are considerably more likely than men to say they feel unsafe walking alone at night in their communities. Women in low-income countries and high-income countries reported the same rate: 41% felt unsafe. In the USA, 38 percent of women felt unsafe, compared with 11 percent of men.

I also want to bring up the young age street harassment begins. For my book, I surveyed 811 women from 23 countries and 45 US states and nearly 1 in 4 had been harassed in public by men by age 12. That’s seventh grade. Nearly 90% had been harassed by age 19.

Some women even say that the first time they heard sexual comments from men on the street was the moment when they felt they transitioned from girlhood to womanhood. This is a sad statement about womanhood in our society.

In the USA, Monday is Women’s Equality Day. I argue that the USA – and no other country – will achieve women’s equality until street harassment ends. Until we can travel and study abroad, walk to the corner store, wait for a bus, and go to a park without fearing or experiencing sexual harassment, we are not equal.

What can we do?

If you’ve faced street harassment, share your stories, especially with men in your life. Make visible this too-often invisible problem. If someone shares a story with you, don’t dismiss it, don’t tell them it’s a compliment, don’t tell them it’s their fault because of what they’re wearing or that they shouldn’t have been there or out alone. Instead, believe them, offer them support, and tell them you’re sorry that happened.

If you have children, nieces/nephews, teach or mentor youth, talk to them about sexual harassment, about respect, and about how to get help. Let’s ensure that the next generation can be in public spaces safely.

Most of all, don’t harass others, be respectful. Ask for consent before talking to someone. Never use sexual language on the street with someone you don’t know without permission to do so. Treat people how you would want someone you love to be treated.

Let’s make public places free from sexual harassment.

Women’s Equality Day: Safe Streets = Our Right!

August 26, 2012 By HKearl

Editor’s Note: For Women’s Equality Day, I’m posting an excerpt of the speech I gave at the We Are Woman Rally in Washington, DC, last weekend. We should have equality, but we don’t. We don’t even have the right to walk down the street safely, without facing harassment. We must keep speaking out and demand that right!

One of our most basic rights should be the right to walk down the street safely, without facing harassment, yet that is a right that many women are routinely denied.

Limited research shows that at least 80 percent of women have experienced gender-based street harassment, including unwanted leering, “catcalls,” sexually explicit comments, demands for a smile, groping, stalking, and public masturbation.

Two years ago, I wrote a book about this topic and I run a website where people share their stories. Two days ago, a 19-year-old shared her story and this is how she opened it:

“On most days I find that I get stopped on the street by men. On a few occasions they have been aggressive, threatening and have followed me home…I have become accustomed to being particularly cautious and paranoid when I walk anywhere alone. I thought it was normal for woman to feel unsafe when out alone.”

This is heartbreaking. But sadly, the reality is, feeling unsafe and cautious because of street harassment—or the threat of it—is a way of life for so many women.

Instead of street harassment being treated as the human rights violation that it is, typically, it’s normalized; it’s treated as a joke, a compliment, or the fault of the harassed person.

I was reminded of this in June when I led a successful Change.org petition to take down a “pro-street harassment” sign at a construction site in a New Jersey Mall. The fact that the sign existed at all was problematic and then, when the petition’s success was covered by major media outlets and discussed on radio shows and local blogs across the country, I was shocked by just how rampantly people engaged in victim-blaming or dismissed the issue altogether.

If you’re like me, you want to live in a world where women can go to school, work, community meetings, corner stores, and local parks safely. Here are three things you can to do make this happen.

1. Share your own stories (online and aloud), especially with men. Bring this issue out into the open. Make it so this human rights violation cannot be ignored anymore.

2. Vote more women into office in the elections this November. A quick example why — this past February, I joined Collective Action for Safe Spaces in testifying about sexual harassment on the DC Metro system before the DC City Council during the transit authority’s performance oversight hearing. The transit authority kept downplaying our concerns, but, when the chair of the committee, Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser heard our stories, she told the transit authority leaders (all men) that they needed to do something. She said that, “As a woman, I feel differently” about the issue. Thanks to her, the transit authority has taken several measures to address the issue, including a new online reporting form and a public service announcement campaign.

3. Support an exciting new project that I am announcing for the first time. Four years ago, I founded Stop Street Harassment as an awareness-raising website. Now, Stop Street Harassment is a new nonprofit organization. The first project will be to work with a survey firm to conduct a sorely needed national street harassment study. You can help fund the street harassment study at www.StopStreetHarassment.org/Donate.

Now is the time to demand your right to safe streets! And together, let’s make sure that the next generation of women never has to think that feeling unsafe on the streets is normal!!

Women’s Equality Day Wish: No Street Harassment

August 26, 2011 By HKearl

The Guardian just published an op-ed I wrote for today’s Women’s Equality Day! Check it out and consider leaving a comment.

(By the way, a dozen op-eds and articles I’ve written have been published since I did The Op-Ed Project training last year. I highly recommend it!!)

A man dubbed the “Upper East Side Groper” allegedly groped at least a dozen women in Manhattan before getting caught earlier this month. On the heels of his arrest, last week three gropings perpetrated by one man were reported in Queens, New York. Meanwhile, in northern Virginia, a man nicknamed the “butt slasher” has assaulted at least nine young women in shopping malls across the past few months. He has not been caught.

Aren’t these just unfortunate, isolated, random incidents, you may ask. No.

The news stories simply bring to light experiences that happen to too many women. Recently, when a woman in Astoria, New York, blogged about a man groping her, 45 women emailed her with similar stories. More than half of 800 female survey respondents of a 2008 study said they had been groped or sexually touched in public. The majority of the respondents were only in their teens and twenties. When I was 18 years old, a man groped me on a street near my college campus, making me part of that percentage.

Today is Women’s Equality Day in the United States. But equality is more of a wish than our reality when so many inequalities exist – including women’s unequal access to public places because of gender-based street harassment, including gropings and slashings.

Street harassment comprises actions and comments between strangers in public that are disrespectful, creeping, threatening and unwanted. It ranges from whistling and sexist or sexual comments to flashing, stalking, groping and assault. It primarily impacts women, including more than 80% of women worldwide, and it directly limits their access to public spaces.

The milder forms of harassment like whistling and comments are often dismissed as a compliment – something women “ask for” – or a harmless annoyance. The reality is, they cause harm; and their accumulation can make women feel wary in public and even “choose” not to go places unaccompanied.

For Psychology Today, Dr Kathryn Stamoulis recently wrote about how a teenage girl she counsels confided that she did not want to run errands for her parents or go to school unaccompanied because adult men sexually harass her. Many harassed individuals are like her: teenage girls whose perception of self, of men, and of their place in the world, is negatively impacted by the sexual harassment they face on the streets.

Women who face lots of mild forms of harassment, or just one serious form like groping or stalking, may feel obliged to change commuting routes, only go places accompanied, or even move neighbourhoods, change jobs or quit hobbies to avoid further victimisation. Street harassment genuinely impedes women’s equality by limiting women’s access to public places; it denies them the liberty they should have of being able to walk freely in public without harassment.

Thankfully, more and more people are recognising that street harassment is a barrier to equality and a denial of liberties – and they’re taking action. Ever since New York City councilwoman Julissa Ferreras found out that teenage girls in her district face street harassment on their way to and from school, she has made the issue a priority. Last week, she took to the streets to raise awareness about the rampant groping in Queens, and last fall, she broke new ground by organising the first-ever city council hearing on street harassment.

A college student at Stanford University with whom I’ve corresponded is currently organising a coalition of people and groups in the California Bay Area to advocate for anti-street harassment measures. This summer, she worked with transit authorities to add sexual harassment information to their brochures and website and possibly to start an awareness ad campaign.

In Washington, DC this past spring, 50 volunteers, just ordinary residents of the city, participated in a community safety audit, organised by Holla Back DC! and me. On designated dates, they fanned out across the city to analyse what the streets looked like during the day, and at night, and then made recommendations for how to make the city safer. During the last week of September, we will be encouraging interested persons to keep a “street harassment log” for a week using a log we provide. Because street harassment is under-documented and researched, the goals of these projects are to start documenting harassment better – and to add to the growing number of stories being collected online – so we can then work on solutions.

What can you do to ensure women have equal access to public spaces? Your role can be as simple as sharing a story, talking about boundaries and consent, or helping out when you see harassment occurring. Every action helps and every action can bring us closer to Women’s Equality Day being a reality, not just a wish.

There will be no equality as long as women are harassed in public places

August 26, 2010 By HKearl

On Women’s Equality Day, Americans celebrate the rights women have gained. Since the passage of the 19^th amendment 90 years ago, women can vote, attend any institution of higher education, enter every job field, participate in all sports, own property, control when and if to have children, and run for president. I am grateful for these rights. I also feel a responsibility to help women gain additional basic rights as we strive for full equality.

Earlier this month I received a disturbing story for my blog Stop Street Harassment. A female employee said that male customers regularly sexually harass her at a retail store in Vicksburg, Mississippi. When men began following her to her car, she felt so unsafe she bought a taser. Her manager refused to act so she plans to quit her job to move near her family.

In another recent story submitted to my blog, a woman from Chicago, Illinois, shared how a group of young men on the sidewalk surrounded her as she walked to the subway. They made sexually explicit comments, hissed in her ear, and one groped her buttock. She says these kinds of encounters impact her clothing choices, commuting routes, and the time of day she leaves her home. She wrote, “I feel as though the right to walk freely in public spaces is one I’ve been denied.”

Until women don’t have to move, change jobs, or plan their travel routes, as the Vicksburg and Chicago women and countless others have had to do, because of male harassment and the threat of male assault, women will never achieve full equality. Public places will never be safe and welcoming for women as long as men make sexual and sexist comments, whistle, leer, stalk, masturbate at, and grope them there.

Formal and informal studies show that no matter their age, sexual orientation, race, class, dis/ability, or body type, most women experience this kind of harassment, termed street harassment. This includes 100 percent of women in a 1995 Indianapolis study, 100 percent of women in a 2000 California Bay Area study, and 99 percent of women in an informal online survey I conducted in 2008.

In lieu of laws or societal concern about their plight, women practice scores of strategies at different times to avoid harassment and assault. From my informal survey of 811 women I found that on at least a monthly basis, 37 percent consciously try to wear clothes they think will attract less attention, 46 percent avoid being out at night, and 49 percent change routes on at least a monthly basis. Almost all women practiced these and other strategies at least a few times. Most alarming, just like the woman in Vicksburg, 19 percent have moved neighborhoods because of harassers, and nine percent have changed jobs because of harassers near their workplace or along their commute.

Disappointingly, aside from a few local governments, activist groups, and feminists, American leaders and citizens are doing nothing about this widespread problem. Unlike public harassment motivated by racism or homophobia, harassment motivated by sexism is treated as a joke, a compliment, or a trivial annoyance and women may be blamed for “causing” it. Songs like Katy Perry’s “Starstrukk,” Allstate insurance’s woman jogger mayhem commercial, and Facebook groups like “Grab An Ass Day” reflect these attitudes. This must change if we want gender equality.

I suggest American government leaders and activists learn from other countries’ recent efforts to end street harassment and take their own action. In Cairo, Egypt, Parliament is considering an anti-sexual harassment law that would include public spaces. In Delhi, India, the government and NGOs are conducting studies of different areas of the city to find out what makes women feel unsafe so they can address those issues. This summer local activists and the government of Wales sponsored “One Step Too Far,” a television ad about sexual harassment in public and at work aimed at men that aired during the World Cup.

Can you imagine the positive impact of these or similar initiatives if they were implemented in the United States? The very act of national leaders acknowledging street harassment to be a problem would lead to crucial change.

The responsibility for ending street harassment also lies with each of us. At an individual level, we can all talk and learn about street harassment because problems that are ignored stay problems. We can stand up for women being harassed and report harassers, teach boys to respect women, and empower girls to know how to deal with harassers. And crucially, men who harass women need to stop.

I hope that before another 90 years pass all women can safely enter, use, and enjoy public spaces. Only then can we hope to achieve gender equality. On Women’s Equality Day, let’s all commit to do our part.

What about equality in public spaces?

August 26, 2009 By HKearl

Today is Women’s Equality Day, a time not only to celebrate the gains we have for which our foremothers fought, but also a time to reflect on all of the areas where women continue to lack equality, including in public spaces.

Men who harass and assault women in public spaces – consciously or unconsciously – disrespect women. Their actions exhibit their belief that they have the right to interrupt women’s privacy, demand their attention, and sexualize, insult, humiliate, and hurt them whenever they want. These men generally do not care how their actions make women feel at the time nor do men on a whole understand or care about the many ways the fear or experience of harassment and assault limits women’s movement and feelings of comfort in public spaces.

Women are approached and harassed by men in all contexts, including when they are: commuting to work and school, on business trips and sightseeing in new places, doing errands or going to the club, and as they walk their dog or exercise. They are harassed by men when they are on foot, in a car, riding public transportation, waiting for public transportation, and even as they garden or stand in their own front yard. They are never completely free from the chance that someone will harass them, no matter their age, sexual orientation, race, class, or body type.

Women protest in Egypt. BRImage from International Museum of Women — Women protest in Egypt. Image from International Museum of Women

In lieu of laws or societal outrage and action over this sad reality, women take it upon themselves to try to stay safe, and in the process, often end up curtailing their public lives and access to public spaces. For example, some women avoid going in public places alone and many avoid going alone after dark or in an unfamiliar area to avoid assault. This may mean they miss out on night classes, working extra shifts, or attending networking events.

Other ways women alter their lives to try to avoid being harassed include: taking alternate routes to their destination, mixing up their routine so they do not become predictable, paying for a taxi or driving a car rather than walking or relying on public transportation, wearing baggier and less flattering clothing, and wearing specific facial expressions (assertive, scowling).

To avoid upsetting men who relentlessly get in their space, women may pretend they have boyfriends or husbands (even if they are lesbian), make up fake phone numbers, turn up their ipod, and pretend to talk on the phone.

Women constantly have to be prepared for men to approach them in public and they instantly have to decide how to respond: will they ignore them, will they stand up to them, or will they try to humor and appease them. All options have risks and a woman is never assured that she will be completely safe. This reality is a huge setback in the trajectory toward gender equality.

All over the country and world, there are activists speaking out against and working to end gender-based harassment and assault in public spaces. Their voices are strong and their actions laudable, but they are few in number. We need more activists and, most importantly, we need a widespread, coordinated, and concerted effort to end street harassment.

We must all do our part to make sure women and girls are safe and welcome in public spaces, and one day when they are (I’ll be an idealistic dreamer for a moment), only then will we be able to say women have made great strides toward achieving full equality.