The truth about street harassment

It seems quite fitting that it’s currently anti-street harassment week, as I’ve been meaning to put together my thoughts on the subject for a while. Firstly I would like to say that I actually don’t suffer street harassment anywhere near as badly as I did when I was younger. When I first moved to London when I was 18, it sometimes felt like I was on the recieving end of whistles, catcalls and shouts on a daily basis.

I don’t think this has anything to do with how attractive I was back then compared to now, or how I dressed. I would put it largely down to the fact that I was much younger and more vulnerable-looking back then – more of an easy victim. I also think harassment is more common in London, as the anonymity of the city makes it easier to get away with. And I think these two factors tell you everything you need to know about the mindset and motivations of men who engage in this type of behaviour.

There are still far too many people who think that street harassment is just a bit of harmless flirting, or that you should feel ‘flattered’ when a guy shouts something disgusting at you in the street. Just recently, The Guardian‘s article on plans to make street harassment a criminal offence was met by a barrage of grumbling comments insisting that this law would somehow make ordinary flirting a crime.

Well, as every woman who has been on the receiving end of such harassment can testify, flattered is definitely not how you feel. Intimidated, scared and humiliated are more accurate descriptions – and the perpretrators know this. Not once has a man who has shouted at me in the street or honked his horn at me ever tried to actually engage me in conversation or ask me out on a date. These guys aren’t after a new girlfriend – they’re simply trying to boost their egos by making themselves feel powerful and dominant. They’re nothing but bullies, picking on and intimidating people weaker and smaller than them – i.e. women – to make themsleves feel better.

But even when people recognise the unpleasant nature of harassment, there still seems to be an attitude that women should ‘just get on with’. It’s like back in school when parents’ and teachers’ advice for dealing with bullies is to ‘just ignore them’. And largely we do just ignore them and walk on by. Sometimes this is because we don’t have the energy to confront them, sometimes because we don’t want them to get the satisfaction of a reaction from us, and sometimes because we’ve previously experienced them turn nasty and aggressive when we turn around and stick up for ourselves.

But that doesn’t help the feelings of fear or humiliation. ‘Just ignoring them’ doesn’t take away the nervousness you feel when you see a group of lads walking towards you, and it doesn’t stop you crossing the road to avoid them just in case. It doesn’t stop you avoiding certain areas or roads at certain times of the day. In short, your freedom of movement and involvement in public space is still curtailed and restricted even if you try to ignore harassment.

And, to be honest, I think the ultimate effects of ignoring street harassment may be even more serious that this. Because I just can’t shake the feeling that, if you let the ‘small’ things such as street harassment breed untouched, it just creates fertile conditions for the bigger stuff to grow.

Just last week a Mumsnet survey revealed that one in 10 women have been raped and 35% have been sexually assaulted. Rape is about power, dominance and the refusal to respect another person’s bodily autonomy – the same things that street harassment is about. If we refuse to challenge these notions – that men need to be powerful and dominant, that male sexuality is all about aggression, and that women’s body’s are public property – when they manifest in lower-level ways, why are we surprised when they then manifest themselves in far more serious ways?

There are a lot of poisitive things women are doing to combat harassment right now. We are sharing our stories, coming up with tactics to deal with it, and campaigning for better laws surrounding it. But I think the problem is that street harassment still boils down to antiquated – yet still heavily engrained – notions that male sexuality is all about power and that to be a ‘real man’ means dominating another person. As long as there are men buying into this degrading and damaging stereotype, then there will still be men who get a kick out of harassing women. To really start fighting male-on-female sexual violence in all its forms, we need to pick apart the cult of masculinity and ensure men reject its clasp themselves.

Sexist online abuse: Why it’s not just bloggers that are targets

There’s been a lot of discussion online over the past week about the sexist abuse female bloggers put up with from internet trolls. It all kicked off with an article by Helen Lewis-Hasteley in the New Statesman asking female writers for their experiences, carried on to a panel discussion in The Guardian, and has been covered by dozens more bloggers and columnists.

Internet trolls: Definitely not as cute as this...

We all know that anyone expressing an opinion on the internet – male or female – is likely to receive insults and abuse of some kind. Some people take the cloak of anonymity as a green light to act like a prize twat and say things they’d never say to someone’s face.  But females, particularly ones writing about politics or feminism, seem to encounter a particularly nasty, sexualised, gender-based strain of abuse.

Sometimes you’ll get called ‘Ugly’, ‘Lesbian’, or ‘Hairy’ (as if not being attractive automatically makes everything a person says worthless and their opinions invalid). Other times it gets far more sinister – many female bloggers have reported finding rape and death threats in their inboxes.

I wanted to add my two cents about my on experiences of online harassment to highlight the fact that it’s not just bloggers that are targeted. If you’re a female involved in politics or campaigning in any way, be prepared to become a target. Personally, the worst abuse I ever encountered was when I was volunteering for all-female environmental campaigning group Climate Rush.

Vile messages were often left on our Facebook page, one particularly nasty one that sticks in my mind is: “You’re not real women – real women are to be respected, all you lot are good for is to be f***ed in the **** and left for dead in the gutter.” Once someone got hold of a member’s personal email address and sent her an anonymous message calling her a w**** and threatening to throw sulphuric acid in her face.

On top of this we had a lot of “Who’d wanna shag any of you lot?” and “You’re all hairy lezzers!” type comments, which to be honest I find pretty funny, especially as I’m neither a lesbian or particularly hairy (and even if I was, so bloody what?). I also think that if you’re going to use childish insults against me then you obviously don’t have a single well-formed argument with which to disagree with me. However, the actual threats of violence were terrifying. Knowing someone had got hold of one of our personal email addresses (which wasn’t publicly available), and contacted us anonymously, did make me question my safety and if what I was doing was worth it.

I also am certain that we received these comments and threats because of our gender. I’ve seen male bloggers and activists called many things online, but they are usually non-gender specific insults, such as ‘naive hippy’, ‘dirty hippy’, or even ‘d***head’ (yep, internet trolls are such wordsmiths). I have never once seen a man told he should shut up because he’s ugly and no one wants to sleep with him.

Looking back, I think the threats did make me more nervous about expressing my opinions about certain subjects too strongly online, and caused me to take a more softly-softly approach. People abuse and harass in this way because they want someone to shut up, and I’m sad to say that, for me, it worked for a while.

But now, hearing all the women speaking out recently has been really inspiring, and made me realise how important it is that we keep exposing these cowards (because that is what they are) and don’t waste our precious time getting distracted and engaging in discourse with them and, most importantly, don’t let them shut us up. If we want to change all those awful stats, like the fact 4/5 MP’s are still male, then we need to rally against this because I strongly believe it is putting young women off engaging in politics, writing and campaigning.

I’m not sure if censorship/ greater moderation is the answer. The internet is too wild a beast to tame, plus shutting these people up often adds fuel to their fire, causing them to shout “but it’s my freeeeeeeedom of speeeeeeeech, you evil fascist censors!”. I also think taking away anonymity is a massively dark pathway that we really don’t want to walk down. However, I think some kind of ‘naming and shaming’ blog to post abusive comments on could be good, if only to show other women who are receiving harassment that they’re not alone and to provide help and support.

Some people have suggested that the women speaking out at present are ‘belittling’ the abuse the abuse that men receive. This isn’t the case – I am sure some prominet male campaigners and writers receive some very nasty stuff. But this is a subject we can only talk about our own personal experiences of and, in my case, the worst abuse I have received is gender-based, so this is what I am going to talk about. If you are a male activist/ blogger fed up with the harassment you receive, then by all means blog about it, write about it, tweet about it – no one is stopping you!

All in all, I think the best way to beat these trolls is to ignore them, carry on writing, working together and supporting each other until we become a force and voice significantly stronger than them. Hopefully our voices will one day drown out theirs.

Want to read what other writers have been saying? Hannah Pool at The Guardian has written about the racist and sexist abuse she receives as a black writer, Suzanne Moore has detailed the harassment she’s received even before the days of the interwebs, Sianushka has written about the the various forms of sexist online abuse and the excuses people make for them, and Cath Elliott has detailed the horrific comments she was subjected to earlier this year, and how she dealt with them.

(Picture by Cali4beach, shared under creative commons)

Craftivist Collective: The giant global love letter

Check out these great pics from the Craftivist Collective‘s latest action, which took place at the Hayward Gallery last week.

To coincide with Tracey Emin’s exhibition ‘Love is what you want’, which explores themes of love, the collective produced a giant embroidered letter asking gallery-goers to show love to ‘our global neighbours struggling in our unjust world.’

Around 60 crafters ‘signed’ the letter by stitching their names onto tags, along with a sentence describing the ways in which they would try make a difference to the world.

I love projects like this – they prove that contemporary craft can be relevant and topical, as well as providing a fun and engaging way of involving the public in activism. It’s far more enjoyable than just signing yet another e-petition.

If you’d like to get involved with the group’s actions, head to the Royal Festival Hall cafe at 6.30pm tomorrow to join the ‘Don’t Blow It‘ workshop and learn how to stitch a letter to your MP onto a hankerchief.

Photos courtesy of Robin Prime

We’re all going to die!: Embroidery by Frau Shizzle

I love this playful, tongue-in-cheek embroidered commentary from German crafter Frau Shizzle, aka Christin.

The message literally translates as ‘We’re all going to die.’ Frau states on her Flickr page that she created it in response to the scaremongering headlines in her local media over the recent E Coli outbreak, but I’m sure we can apply it to any of the media-hysteria outbreaks we’re accustomed to seeing on a daily basis.

Cheers to Mr X Stitch for bringing Frau to my attention

 

England riots: Think before you say ‘scum’

As the flames die down and the country returns to calm, an ugly phantom is rising from the ashes of the burnt-out cars and gutted buildings. It screams things like “Scum!” and “Hang tham all!” and pleeds with the Government to call in the army and shut down the internet. And it looks just like me and you.

Yes, almost as depressing as the scenes of looting and violence are the disproportionate reactions they seem to have sparked in otherwise reasonable, level-headed people. Thousands have signed the internet petition calling for convicted rioters’ benefits to be talen away (because having no money is exactly what stops people stealing, of course). And according to a YouGov Poll, 33% of the country would support live ammuninition being used. That’s one third of the population calling for children who steal to be murdered. Wow.

A very clear ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been created in the public rhetoric. The rioters are the violent, morally-defunct underclass. They are not like us. And because of this, they deserve the worst of punishments.

This kind of thinking is dangerous for all sorts of reasons. But firstly we have to ask – is it even really true? Do you have to be a vicious, borderline psychopathic individual to find yourself entering into this behaviour? Are the rioters really that different to the rest of us?

Calling someone ‘scum’, or even ‘chav’, is a self-serving act. You’re drawing a distinction between them and yourself. They’re a different type of person – perhaps even a sub-person – they’re different to you. You would never behave like that.

The same thing happens when people describe murderers and paedophiles as ‘monsters’ and ‘beasts’. Making them non-human makes it easier for us to understand them and their horrific deeds. And less threatening – it means that you, or no one you know, could ever do anything like that. It’s worth noting that those calling for the return of the death penalty often use this kind of language.

But the rioters we’re already seeing appearing in court just don’t fit in to the stereotype we’ve created. In fact, the most striking thing about some is just how ‘normal’ they seem to be – how much like ‘us’. There’s the teaching assistant. The graphic designer. The university graduates. The wealthy grammar school girl. People with no previous criminal convictions. So what tipped them over the edge? What turned them from one of ‘us’ into one of ‘them’ – what transformed them into ‘scum’?

Perhaps crowd psychology can offer us an explanation. Research shows that, when in a group, individuals tend to adopt the behaviour of those around them, and disgard their own moral compass. The group offers the individual anonymity, making them more likely to behave in ways they usually wouldn’t. There’s a good explanation in Psychology Today, found here.

Even more crucially, being in a group offers a diffusion of responsibility when committing questionable acts. The guilt and responsibility you would normally feel when stealing from or hurting another is alleviated because you don’t feel personally responsible. The group is responsible; others are responsible.

This understanding has gone some way to explaining why people commit atrocities as part of a group that they would never do alone, such as during wars or under dictatorships.

Furthermore, I’d hazard a guess that those just looting – not setting fire to buildings, or robbing and beating individuals – possibly convinced themselves, in the heat of the moment, that they were committing a victimless crime. They were breaking into shops – not people’s homes – and, as interviews such as this show, perhaps saw them as owned by ‘the rich people,’ people who could afford to lose things.

Of course there were hardened career criminals taking part in the riots. But many of those standing in the docks and sitting in police cells around the country appear to be ordinary people who got swept up in the crowd mentality, saw an opportunity to grab some free stuff, and didn’t think there’d be any consequences.

It seems there’s a very fine tipping point between being a regular, law-abiding citizen and doing things you would normally never consider. This is not to excuse anything they did – theft and arson are serious crimes, and they must be treated as such. Those convicted must understand that what they did was wrong, whether that’s through prison, community service, or through progressive measures such as being forced to meet their victims so they can understand the consequences of their actions, or perhaps a mixture of them all.

But whatever happnes, let’s not create an ‘us’ and ‘them’. History shows us that ordinary people can easily commit ghastly acts they would never normally consider partaking in. It’s happening right now in wars around the world, and it happened in the Holocaust too.

Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the first thing to eventually lead to the Holocaust was the ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric created by the media and German government when talking about Jewish people. Yes, the riots brought out the very worst of all those involved. Let’s not let them bring out the worst in us too.

Uk UnCut protests: A one-woman (or man) way to campaign

On Saturday 4 September activist Bryony Evens found a clever and original way of contributing to the UK UnCut protests against tax avoidance.

Targeting Philip Green, who owns what seems to be half the high street and has been appointed to advise the Government on spending cuts despite being a suspected tax dodger, Bryony found a way of protesting that doesn’t require placards, crowds or chants and can be carried out in any arcadia-owned store at any time of day.

Read her blog and ‘One woman protest’ description here

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal: Using social networking to push for change

What has the internet brought us? Lolcats, the crazy frog and countless autotune remixes? Most well-known internet viral phenomena ranges from the banal to the irritating. But recently, more people than ever are starting to see social media as more than just a means to waste time at work. We are beginning to discover just how effectively we can use the web to push for social change and justice.

One such viral campaign I have stumbled upon recently is the call to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), the controversial US law which bans gays, lesbians and bisexuals from serving in the military

President Barack Obama pledged to repeal the law as part of his presidential campaign but moves have been consistently blocked by republican senetors, in particular John McCain. But campaigners have not given up, and the online push to repeal the law has spread like wildfire over the internet.

You Tube has become awash with ‘My DADT story’ videos,  in which ex-servicemen who have been discharged for being gay or lesbian speak to the camera about their experiences.

One of the most shared is by is ex-Sailor Jared Mcintosh. On 3rd August he posted a video explaining how he took a mobile phone containing pictures of him and his boyfriend on to a restricted submarine. The official reason for his dismissal was given as both taking banned equipment in to a restricted area, and for being gay.

The video soon racked up over 60,000 hits and Jared posted several follow-ups. The beauty of the internet is that it allows us to share stories such as this which would otherise pass by unheard. In this case, these young peoples’ stories have brought the injustice of DADT to the attention of people who perhaps would never have considered its implications.

Even Lady Gaga has joined in the online campaigning. In the past she would have had to go through traditional media to broadcast such a message – unlikely given its content.

But has any of this acheived anything? Last week saw the publication of a US Pentagon study which found over 70% of military personnel don’t believe openly gay soldiers serving in the army would lower morale in any way, and public support for a repeal is at roughly 65%.

With stats like this, holding off a repeal is looking tougher than ever for the seante.