What is Street Harassment? What Can We do About It?

Picture begging your friend to escort you home every night after a long SING! rehearsal or after a swim meet. Exasperated, he questions your motives. Slightly embarrassed, you explain that it’s because you don’t feel safe walking home late in the night; drawing on past experiences, you fear being harassed by strangers on the street. Your friend, wanting nothing more than to go home and writing it off as “not a big deal,” declines your request. You’re left to take a much longer, but safer, route home, just to avoid harassment.

This predicament might be fictional, but it’s a harsh reality for many women, and it doesn’t get the recognition that it should.

Knowing that street harassment for women is often downplayed as a normal part of city life, director Rob Bliss came up with an idea for a video project: to capture 10 hours of footage of what it is like to be a woman walking the streets of New York City in 2014. Actress Shoshana Roberts starred in the video that has since gone viral. As she walks down the street with slightly downcast eyes, men leer at her, comment on her body, and even silently trail her for blocks.

Stop Street Harassment, a nonprofit organization that works to document and end street harassment, reports that 65 percent of American women are victims of street harassment. This includes leering, honking and whistling, sexist comments, vulgar gestures, sexually explicit comments, kissing noises, following, blocking of paths, sexual grabbing and touching, assault, and masturbation. In Tokyo, 64 percent of women in their 20s and 30s report being groped in their daily commute. And according to another French study, 100 percent of women say they have been sexually harassed at least once while taking public transportation.

For some women, the harassment becomes intolerable. According to Holly Kearl, who founded Stop Street Harassment, street harassment has made women change their lifestyle drastically, such as avoiding locations where they were harassed, not going places alone, and in extreme cases, quitting their jobs and moving away.

But before we can attack this problem at its roots, we need to understand the motives behind street harassment. Some people do it to assert dominance or scare an individual, which explains why women often get harassed even more by talking back. Sociologist Laura Beth Nielsen says that when a stranger comments on a woman’s looks, for instance, it is supposed to be “invisible to other people around. The…woman doesn’t know where [the comment is] going, and, a lot of times, may feel violated or threatened.” When enduring this feeling of uneasiness, most victims of street harassment simply lower their heads and keep walking, much like what some of our own parents told us to do when dealing with bullies: just ignore it. But ignoring street harassment has taken away from the credibility of the real psychological impact it has on women.

We as a society need to reverse this notion and help victims feel protected. We need to let women know that asking for help, from a trusted person or a police officer, is completely acceptable. People need to know how prevalent street harassment is, and both the federal and local government should ensure that women don’t have to let harassment get to the point where they must change anything they do in order to avoid it—not the way they dress, their route home, their jobs, or their home addresses.

In New York, there are already many laws combating street harassment. For “disorderly conduct,” which constitutes “yelling sexist or homophobic comments, using obscene, offensive, or lewd language, or someone blocking your path on the sidewalk or in the street,” the perpetrator may receive a fine or imprisonment. Repeated activity that “seriously annoys” another person and is done for no discernible reason may have the same consequence. Any form of sexual misconduct is illegal; forcible touching is punishable with up to a year in prison.

If women feel like the harassment has gone too far, the government should make it clear that it’s okay to say something, through widespread programs to spread awareness. In this day and age, dissemination of information is incredibly easy. Ads, in the form of posters or online ads, especially in city areas where street harassment is most common, will serve as constant, gentle reminders to women that it’s fine to tell someone about harassment. Even 30-second videos, on YouTube or television, go a long way in spreading the message. Police should also be more alert and fully ready to step in if harassment escalates into something illegal, like stalking or sexual harassment.

Most importantly, people need to change their perceptions of street harassment. Dismissing catcalls as compliments is tantamount to condoning verbal harassment that makes women feel uncomfortable. Commenting on a woman’s body should not be seen as a form of validation. Rather, it is degrading to the status of women and takes away from their sense of safety on the streets because verbal harassment has the potential to quickly escalate into physical harassment.

Eliminating street harassment requires much more than a change in fundamental law; it requires a change in fundamental perception. If this change can be accomplished, by educating and discouraging street harassers and encouraging women to talk to the police, we can accomplish the ultimate goal that the women’s suffrage movement strove for. Women don’t have to be forced to look down, keep walking, and ignore it. If we succeed in stamping out street harassment, they will finally be able to walk the streets proud and happy to be a woman.