Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

It’s time to audit your city, Washington, DC!

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On Sunday, I declared March 20, the First Day of Spring, to be Anti-Street Harassment Day. Already more than 120 people have RSVPed to participate via Facebook, plus many more via Twitter. I hope you will, too. I’m excited to reveal what I’ll be doing on March 20 and I invite everyone who lives or works in Washington, DC, to participate, too!

What’s happening?

HollaBack DC! and I are organizing the FIRST Community Safety Audit to be conducted in Washington, DC, and the first to be conducted in the US in the past 15 years. This means we are organizing groups of people, training group leaders, and giving everyone a checklist of items to look for as they walk a few blocks in DC. Participants will be looking for specific items that will help indicate if the area is safe and inclusive for everyone.

In order to conduct audits in all 8 Wards, we need at least 80 volunteers. The time commitment is about two hours on March 20 and two hours on March 23.  Please sign up and ask your friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers who work or live in Washington, DC, to sign up too.

Where did this idea come from?

Women in Tanzania who conducted a community safety audit

When I attended an international conference on safe cities for women held in India last November, I learned about the community safety audits and immediately wanted to bring the initiative to the USA. People have conducted Community Safety Audits since 1989, when the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence against Women & Children (METRAC) developed it in Toronto. Since then, they’ve been conducted in cities across Canada and internationally in cities in Russia, the UK, India, South Africa, and Tanzania. Our audit is adapted from METRAC’s.

This is your chance to be part of history!

Please sign up to volunteer for this important initiative in March. We want volunteers from all demographics and we will work to ensure that individuals with special mobility needs and/or childcare needs can participate.

The outcomes of the audit will be used to make recommendations to the DC City Council and other local decision-makers.  In April (date TBD) we will announce those asks at an anti-street harassment rally, which we hope will lead to the first ever DC City Council hearing on street harassment, following in the footsteps of New York City. So participating in the community safety audit is an opportunity to be part of history and to help establish a model for other cities to use.

Let’s all work together to take a good look at our city and see what we’d like to fix!

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In Delhi, 2 out of 3 women experience harassment

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Safe Delhi PSA

Two out of three women in Delhi suffered sexual harassment at least 2-5 times during the last year. Via the BBC:

“Women in the national capital feel unsafe in many public spaces, and at all times of the day and night,” the survey says.

Public transport, buses and roadsides are reported as spaces where women and girls face high levels of sexual harassment.

Most women who were surveyed said buses were the most unsafe form of transport.

Many said the Metro system, which used to be safer earlier, is now equally crowded and unsafe.

The report says the most common forms of harassment are “verbal (passing lewd comments), visual (staring and leering) and physical (touching or groping or leaning over)”.

Women of all classes have to put up with harassment in their daily lives, but students between 15 and 19 years old and women employed in the informal sector are specially vulnerable, the survey says.

The findings come from a “Safe Cities Baseline Survey” of more than 5,000 people who were interviewed during Jan – March of this year, and the survey was commissioned by the NGO Jagori/Safe Delhi, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and UN Habitat.

The report findings are unsurprising since a study conducted last fall showed that 96 percent of women surveyed in Delhi are afraid to be in public alone because of the high rates of harassment and risk of assault (view a newsclip about the study).

Also,  another survey of women in Delhi from earlier this year tracked their experiences in specific areas of the city and found that 1/3 of the women faced verbal harassment and half of the women felt unsafe there. Several recommendations came out of that survey, including traffic monitoring.

Like most big cities, men’s harassment of women in public places is clearly a huge problem and one that impedes women’s mobility and equality with men. Thankfully, groups like the UN and Jagori/Safe Delhi are addressing this reality.

In addition to surveying people and writing reports, Jagori/Safe Delhi is doing great ground work to make the city safer for women.

Also, check out some of their humorous anti-sexual harassment PSAs on YouTube.

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SOS Link – Awesome Smart Phone App

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A blog reader sent me info about SOS Link, in her words, “an awesome smart phone app to give us just a little more power over those who see our bodies as public property.”

What SOS Link does is allow you to immediately signal for help (to people you designate) if you’re in danger in public places and it allows you to report a crime (like street harassment). From their website:

“If you encounter an emergency or find yourself in a situation where you feel threatened, you can use your iPhone to send an immediate alert. Simply press the SOS LINK™ icon on your iPhone and point it towards the event or threat. Your iPhone will instantly begin to take photos, one per second, for 30 seconds. You have the choice to run the app with or without the SOS Alert and Siren playing.

The photos you take are sent wirelessly to our servers and are immediately relayed through a secure server to those who you have designated as ‘helpers.’ They get the photos, plus the time, date and your GPS location on a bing™ Map. Your helpers will typically start receiving your alerts within 15 seconds of you capturing the event.

You can also use SOS LINK™ to take photos of other events, such as a break-in or theft, that can be authenticated (time and date stamp; GPS location; secure storage) and used as evidence.

SOS LINK™ operates on iPhone™ and Blackberry™ Models and soon on other smartphone models.”

Awesome! If I had a smart phone (one of these days…) I’d definitely get this app. It’d make me feel safer going places alone, knowing I had a way to get help. And plus, it can be really useful when you see street harassment occurring or you are the victim of street harassment because then you can get evidence to use to show the crime.

In the coming months you can look out for another smart phone app being produced by HollaBack which will let you report street harassment via a GPS mapping system. The reports then will be included in a “State of our Streets” report for city officials to review so they can take necessary steps to end street harassment.

It’s  nice when we can use technology to our advantage so we can be safer and work to end street harassment!

(& thanks to the anonymous blog reader for the SOS Link tip)

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