International Anti-Street Harassment Day

If you didn’t know it, today is International Anti-Street Harassment Day. I can’t take part in it physically as this is the first year and as is to be expected, there’s not much going on near me, so I thought I’d participate the best way I know how!

What is ‘street harassment’?

Street harassment is a piece of the huge jigsaw that is rape culture and it happens to loads of women everywhere, every single day. I don’t think the term ‘street’ is literal (or at least it isn’t to me); more a reference to generally being out and about in public places. It can happen in the street, but it can also happen in clubs, pubs, at house parties, at concerts, or in the shops. It’s where any form of harassment is carried out – though the focus of Anti-Street Harassment Day tends to be sexual harassment. So you’ve got inappropriate touching, being shouted at, being stalked, and the list goes on.

It’s a feminist thing, but men are not excluded

On IWD, a lot of men chimed up ‘what about us?!’ and not only is there an International Men’s Day for you, but you’ll find that concepts in feminism – even rape culture and street harassment – can apply to men too. As an example, I went out clubbing with my housemates to a gay bar. My male housemate was accosted in the toilets by a gay man who wanted him to keep the toilet door open so he could see. When politely told no, the man went to the cubicle next door, pulled himself up in between the two cubicles and confronted him again. Luckily, he didn’t see anything, and my housemate was polite and told him to go away. Yet for the rest of the night, every time he went to the toilets, he was followed by the same man. Eventually, he decided he would go into the ladies’ toilets (for the club’s rules stated that men were allowed in the womens’ toilets but not the other way round) and ‘pretend to be gay’ in order to get away with being there.

He had to change his behaviour in order to avoid being harassed – and this is exactly the conundrum I and many other women are faced with every single time we go out. We want to look good, but we need to make sure that we don’t look so good that we’re ripe for the taking. If we wear a low-cut top, short skirt or anything slightly more revealing than a nun’s habit, we are to expect to be ogled and shouted at, maybe even approached, by men who think that they somehow have the right to say or do anything to a woman if they see enough flesh.

Street harassment is essentially ‘unwanted attention’

For as long as I’ve had a social life, I’ve been harassed by men when I’ve been out; even just walking along the street. One of my first memories of this is when I was about 14. I was walking home in my school uniform minding my own business. I don’t think I had an MP3 player then (nowadays I am never seen without one, because it works as a barrier to stop people from talking to me) so I could hear every single word. Three young black men who were standing on the other side of the road to me, or walking along, noticed me and started calling me a “white prostitute”, “slag”, “whore”, “fucking white bitch” and other variations; you name it, I was called it.

And for what? Walking home. In a school uniform. By this time I was past any shops that I could walk into, so I had no choice but to carry on, trying not to react to promote further shouting, or worse. I then realised that they were following me. My heart was racing, but all I could think was that if I could just make it home, I’d be safe. I got home okay, but they had followed me, right up to my doorstep, and rang on the doorbell. I remember crouching on the floor, hiding under the door window, hoping that they would get bored and go away. They did, eventually. But I refused to walk home alone from school after that, and for a few weeks I lived in fear that now they knew where I lived, they would come back.

Of course, that is probably an exceptional occurrence. You’d think, anyway. The most recent form of harassment I had was in Brighton at a Hurts gig. I’ll keep it short – there was a man stood behind me, crotch touching bum, breathing down my neck. He was much taller and of a bigger build than me and all of my friends, and when I politely asked him to move backwards he started shouting incoherently at me. I thought he was going to physically hurt me. Is it really that unreasonable to expect personal space when you’re a woman?

More subtle forms of harassment take place on a daily basis. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been touched, grabbed, or approached in an aggressive way by men, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. These are just a couple of my stories. If you want to find out more, there’s more information on street harassment at the Stop Street Harassment website.