The path to tackling street harassment
Hannah Bernard highlights the work of existing NGOs that tackle street harassment, and discusses why more such initiatives are necessary.
Source: unsplash
Carmen Godoy, 21, shared her first experience of street harassment: “I was 12, walking alone in my city, Sevilla, for the first time. It was 4 p.m. on a hot day of September. The heat was overwhelming, and I was wearing a skirt. I was on my way to meet some friends. The most direct path to the meeting point was through this little corner of a street, known for the groups of guys that haunted it, phone stealers and, as I learned later, drug dealers. When I reached the street, my phone firmly in my hand and saw them staring at me, I got scared, turned back and walked away quickly. One of them followed me, catcalling me, yelling remarks about my legs and my body. I was too petrified to wait for the friends I was supposed to meet and accelerated my walk in the direction of my house. A few minutes later, as I was walking, I noticed the same guy, following me on a motorcycle. He followed me until my house. This gave me the scare of my life. I was 12. Since that day, I feel really self-conscious both about going out alone and about the length of my clothes.”
Street harassment is a concept that is difficult to grasp and thus fight, as it has never been fully defined. It is a catch-all word which encompasses all types of unwanted sexual attention and violence suffered by individuals, mostly women, in public places. Though street harassment does not affect only women, it affects nearly all of them, and often from a very young age.
Data gathered by Holly Kearl in her book “Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women”, shows that 80 per cent of women endure at least frequent street harassment, 45 per cent feel that they cannot go alone to public spaces and 50 per cent have to cross the street to find alternate routes to their destinations. The pervasiveness of the problem has catalyzed several different initiatives worldwide, attempting to reduce the prevalence of street harassment with mixed results.
An example of the projects which have arisen in recent years, is Cheer Up Luv, created in 2017 by Eliza Hatch, photojournalist from London. Cheer Up Luv is a stand taken against what she calls “a constant in [her] life,” or the too common and overlooked street-harassment issue.
The name of her project emerged from a recurrent “pick-up line” with which she had been approached, once too much. She said, “The number of times I have been told to 'cheer up' by a strange man is countless, and it never gets any more acceptable.”
The project began at a small scale, by asking girls in her entourage if they had street harassment experiences of the kind that they would agree to share. This first step allowed her to realize that not only did all her girlfriends have stories of harassment, but that her male friends were all horrified and in disbelief about the extent of the situation, displaying the lack of awareness around the issue. Eliza thus decided to combine photography and testimonies of women “to capture the confidence in every woman.”
When asked whether it was tough to find participants, Eliza answered that “Most women I asked sent me at least three stories to pick from.” The project then quickly expanded as once it was launched, many women reached out to her, asking to participate.
The aim of the project was to bring attention to the issue of street harassment. In addition, Eliza aspired with this project to create a “wider support network for [...] women and a solidarity between them”.
Different association worldwide have also tried out various responses to street harassment. The Everyday Sexism project is one of them and has created an online safe spaces where victims of street harassment can share their experience and discuss with individuals who have undergone similar episodes. These spaces further allow to show how widespread the issue of street harassment really is. This initiative aims as Eliza Hatch’s project to put the problem in the foreground, leaving no chance for its existence to be denied or diminished.
But the initiator of the anti-street harassment movement is Hollaback. Created in 2005, this NGO originally offered a space for victims to share their stories as well as pictures of their aggressors. In 2020, in conjunction with Hollaback, a French beauty brand, l'Oréal, has launched an anti-harassment campaign. The program, called Stand Up, has centered around “the method of the 5Ds,” which stand respectively for distract the perpetrator, delegate by asking some help, document the harassment, direct by speaking up, and delay by comforting. This method is the basis of an online training on bystander intervention, meaning on how an individual should react when witnessing a scene of street harassment. Recently, the collaboration has also initiated a training for victims of the latter. The initial aim of this program says Molly Fowkes, story-sharing research and design fellow at Hollaback, was to train 200 000 people. That goal has been surpassed recently, leading to the hope of a widespread success of the project.
Another initiative has been undertaken, under the form of archives about street harassment, by the non-profit organization Stop street harassment. The archives offer a wide range of resources to inform oneself as well as to reach support. Among else it displays, most if not all the statistics and surveys realized worldwide on street harassment, as well as links to all the anti-street harassment groups and campaigns known in the world. It also contains a list of books and articles on harassment as well as numbers of hotlines to reach for different types of situations.
Finally, another initiative has sparked, this time in Ireland, with the girls of Maryfield College in Dublin. After having undergone a significant amount of sexual street harassment during the first lockdown, they decided to act in order to tackle this ubiquitous form of gender violence. They began by interviewing a range of a 100 women under the age of 20 and discovered that “some 60 per cent said they had been the subject of catcalling – such as whistling, jeering or sexual comments – during the previous week”. Their plan of action is twofold. On one hand it aims to increase the space taken by street harassment in the education system and on the other, it projects to lobby TDs (the Irish equivalent of MPs) in order for them to explore French-style laws. Indeed, France has introduced in 2018 a law against street harassment, following the example of Belgium which had done so in 2014. In both countries today, a whistle, an inappropriate comment or touch, or any other expression of street harassment can be punished by a fine of at least 90 euros.
However, a year after the law was voted, data showed that the results were more symbolical than effective, with only 731 fines distributed in the French territory for “sexist outrages”. Indeed, only the outrages that were “caught in the act” have been punished and feminist groups fear that the small number of verbalizations become the official data to quantify the phenomenon. Moreover, in France 66 per cent of women responding to a survey by the feminist group Nous Toutes have reported a poor reception when trying to file a complaint for street harassment at the police station, if not a try to deter the victims from filing it at all.
When asked about the real impact of street harassment on women, Fiona Vera-Gray, an activist, researcher, and professor working on violence against women and girls, discusses the hidden face of Street Harassment with a concept that she calls “The right amount of panic.” This expression evokes the paradoxical behavior which is being asked of women today. Vera-Gray explains that since women have always been told to dismiss their experiences “regardless of how they make them feel, [they] learn to doubt their own sense-making of an event (is he staring at me or just looking my way? Did he just touch me or is it just that the train carriage is full)?” As a consequence, a woman can never know how to react, always taking the risk of either being called paranoid or hysterical, or of undergoing sexual harassment.
Moreover, if a woman does have “the right amount of panic” and prevents sexual harassment from happening, her success cannot be measured as it is represented by the absence of harassment. However, if all the techniques women have elaborated, integrated and apply on a daily basis do not succeed in preventing an occurrence of sexual violence, they will be blamed for it.
A lot of the initiatives taken until now to challenge the issue have achieved the very important first step of giving a voice to the victims and of making it more difficult for individuals to deny the wide existence of the phenomenon. However, one problem remains: most of the concrete solutions offered by these associations involve the victim taking action. Few are institutional and if they are, they often have a frail impact on real life situations.
Street harassment is an offence to the victim's dignity, integrity. It makes them feel scared and takes their confidence away. Currently, not only do women have to endure the sexual harassment, but they then have to teach about it. Moreover, they very often restrict themselves from practicing certain activities, taking certain paths, wearing certain clothes etc. in conscious or unconscious attempts to avoid being harassed.
Thus, the path created by existing organizations and NGOs should be followed and supported until we reach a world where women do not fear harassment on the streets of their own cities.
This is a solutions journalism article produced as during the 2021 SoJourn write-a-thon. Solutions journalism is investigative reporting on responses to social issues. Learn more about it here.