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Street Harassment Resources
Scholarly books & articles on street harassment:
Bowman, Cynthia Grant. "Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women," Harvard Law Review 106, no 3 (January 1993): 517-580.
Bowman examines how the law can ignore the harmful experiences of women, including their experiences with harassment in public by strangers. She evaluates the criminal and civil laws that might be used to stop harassment and examines their failings. She proposes new methods for stopping street harassment and opening up the public sphere to women.
Fogg-Davis, Hawley. A Black Feminist Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment. Philadelphia Political Theory Workshop, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
Fogg-Davis discusses how street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semi-public places, and the ways in which black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race and the race of their harasser(s). She also addresses issues of harassment of lesbian women.
Gardner, Carol Brooks. Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
Passing By explores the important yet little-examined issue of gender-related public harassment. Based on extensive research--including in-depth interviews with nearly five-hundred women and men in Indiana --it documents the many types of indignity visited on women in public places. Harassment in public, Gardner shows, crosses all lines of age, class, and ethnicity and follows a typical pattern whereby a man or men take advantage of a woman's momentary or permanent vulnerability. Beyond describing the scope and variety of harassing behaviors, the book investigates the different ways women and men respond to and interpret them.
Langelan, Martha. Back Off: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers (New York: Fireside, 1993).
Back Off! will change your life if you've always felt there was nothing to do about "compliments," gropes, and the fear of assault on the streets. Back Off! examines the dynamics of sex and power in sexual harassment, the motives behind harassers' actions, and why traditional responses such as appeasement or aggression don't work, and describes the successful resistance strategies that you really can use -- including nonviolent personal confrontation techniques, group confrontations, administrative remedies, and formal lawsuits. The second half of the book are street harassment confrontation sucess stories sent in to Langelan when she worked as the president of the Washington, DC Rape Crisis Center and particular show the experiences of women in the Washington, DC area.
Nielsen, Laura Beth. License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
License to Harass looks at the causes and responses to street harassment in three categories, begging, racial harassment and sexual harassment. She particularly looks at why there are no laws in place to stop offensive and damaging verbal abuse on the street and what people's opinions are of the potential of such laws (the opinions of both those who experience the harassment and those who do not). She conducts her interviews in the San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley area.
Others:
Documentaries on street harassment:
Hadleigh-West, Maggie. "War Zone." Produced by Hank Levine, 1998.
"War Zone” is about sex, power and what happens when men, either knowingly or unknowingly - threaten a woman’s right to walk undisturbed on the streets. Shot all over the US, but particularly in NYC, Hadleigh-West turns her camera on men in the same way that they turn their aggression on her. “War Zone” is incredibly explosive as footage as the filmmaker places herself in very real danger by daring to ask the men on the streets why they are treating a complete stranger in a sexual way. In the process, she has been hit, yelled at, apologized to and engaged in mesmerizing conversations with the men that have harassed her. Through these conversations, Hadleigh-West reveals the anger, fear and frustration as well as the affection, admiration and humor that characterizes relationships between men and women.
Anti-Street Harassment Organizations:
NYC SafeStreets, formed in 2004, is a group of volunteers working to make the streets safer for women. They provide maps to three neighborhoods in New York City that show where subway stops are, where past assaults of women have occurred, and where there are “SafeStreets Havens.” NYC SafeStreet Havens are businesses where women can go if they feel unsafe from which they can call for a ride or company walking home. SafeStreet Havens can be identified by a NYC SafeStreets Haven sticker in the window and there are about 35 businesses designated as such on the NYC SafeStreet Web site. NYC SafeStreets has an online form where people can provide feedback about walking home safely at night and provide tips or warnings for others. NYC SafeStreets also includes a list of resources on sexual assault on their Web site.
RightRides in New York City offers free rides to women, transgender and “gender queer” people late at night on Saturdays. Their motto is: “Because Getting Home Safely Shouldn't Be A Luxury.” They started in 2004 in direct response to assaults of women walking home late at night in various neighborhoods around the city. The two founders already had a car, so they bought a cell phone for use as a dispatch phone, printed fliers, and then used their own car to start driving callers who felt unsafe walking home free of charge. They recruited other volunteers and between 2004 and 2005, they drove over 200 people home safely. With limited time and resources, RightRides had to turn down about 50% of requests for rides. During 2005, they became a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit and secured a fleet of cars for their volunteer drivers to use. In May 2006, Zipcars donated three cars for use as a permanent fleet. During 2006, RightRides drove over 600 people home safely. RightRides also organizes “Safe Walks” between April and October where bike patrol volunteers in RightRide Patrol vests patrol an area and take calls to escort walkers within a 15 minute radius to their desired location. For example, in 2006 they operated five teams in two major New York City neighborhoods every Thursday night from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. RightRides helps support Neighborhood Safety Meetings on crime prevention. Additionally, RightRides partners with the Center for Anti-Violence Education to provide low-cost, sliding scale self defense classes to women and transgender people.
Rogers Park Young Women's Action Team (YWAT) in Illinois is a group composed of teenage girls combating issues like street harassmetn in their community. The YWAT conducts several ongoing collective actions against street harassment. They hold weekly leadership meetings for the project; host “Girls’ Leadership Camp” for middle school aged girls; present workshops for youth and adults on street harassment throughout Illinois; and conduct various community research efforts and action events. For example, in May 2006 and May 2007 they helped organize the Citywide Day of Action against Street Harassment Campaign that included a community march through Chicago and confrontation demonstrations. Thousands of people participated in the day’s activities and people participated in 150 recorded individual and collective actions against harassment.
One of their most successful projects has been their “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” Campaign. As part of the Campaign they worked with local elected officials, law enforcement, and businesses to raise awareness about the issue of street harassment in the Rogers Park area. They successfully advocated for better lighting on two main streets in the community. They also successfully engaged 120 local businesses in the campaign. The businesses posted anti-street harassment RESPECT posters in their windows that said: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T let me tell YOU what it means to ME! Respect my body. Respect my mind. Respect ME. STOP STREET HARASSMENT.” Similarly, YWAT conducted a successful letter-writing campaign to their mayor to have the week of October 17-23 proclaimed Teen Dating Violence Awareness Week.
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