harassment

Hope

I was driving with my windows down and came to a stop at the stoplight and I look over and there are two young men who decided to tell me how pretty I was and that I should get their number. I was just trying to feel the wind and listen to music, not be harassed.

Anon

In later secondary school I dated this boy and was finding out about myself both in terms of identity and sexuality which lead me to post a of myself in a small top, his friends called me a ‘ret*rd’, ‘whore’, ‘slut’ and so on. They even posted this picture of me, an underaged girl, onto a forum where men would see it and post a ‘tribute’ in return. I was so upset, I was just beginning to find myself and be comfortable with who I am and I had it all ripped away from me by a group of immature, jealous boys. I was harassed for months about this, with my then boyfriend not doing anything to help me at all. I’ve never told anyone about how this has effected me, I still feel embarrassed and disgusted over it and I went through a phase of blaming myself. I know that none of this is my fault and I was just young but sometimes I still find myself angry and upset.

Maggie

I’m currently travelling in Mexico alone, with the aim of regaining my confidence after a struggle with anxiety and depression during the pandemic. I was walking to the shop this morning and on a quieter street there was a man in the bushes masturbating at passers by. It was disgusting. I felt completely violated and so unsafe that I stayed in my hostel all day. After reporting this to my hostel, they reassured me it is secure yet no further measures were taken. I understand this kind of thing happens often in all countries, but looking the man directly in the eye and seeing the excitement he was getting from my fear made me so angry that this had been normalised in my mind, and clearly the minds of others. Measures must be taken to prevent public street harassment, to prevent women’s confidence being destroyed for a man’s enjoyment.

Sydney

For the past several weeks, my workplace has been subjected to a coordinated attack by some random guy with too much time on his hands. I work at a junior college tutoring center and we have been taking Zoom appointments for the past year due to the Pandemic. The link for the Zoom session is public on the website for accessibility. Apparently, some guy online found the link and is now harassing all of us. It started out small with him just coming into the waiting room maybe once or twice a day and leaving soon after. Then it escalated to him repeatedly trying everyday, using different names to try and get into our session. He even impersonated someone who’d graduated a few years before to come into the session. This is bad enough on its own, but the sexism comes in when he got so far as in a Breakout room with me (a private meeting so I could help him) and exposed himself on camera to me. It was very clear that he waited specifically for a woman to be there to do it, and I believe he tries his worse tactics when he believes it’s only women in the session with him. We can’t take down the link so we are just stuck with this nearly constant bombardment until the higher ups “Figure something out.” We can’t not admit him into the Zoom session because we need to be able to let students in who actually need help. It makes me so fucking angry to be powerless in this situation, especially being the one he’s perpetrated the most against. I don’t know who he is, but I hate him. It’s so clear to me that he thinks this is funny, figuring out more and more clever ways to get into our sessions and ruin our days. Just the audacity and sheer amount of time he clearly has to do all of this. Hate isn’t really even a good word for how I feel about him. He clearly represents so many things that are horrible about society’s ignorance of men’s hatred of women. He is *attacking* us virtually and nothing is being done. I wish something very terrible will happen to him. I don’t like working with any of the students on Zoom anymore and I can’t wait for the end of the semester when I leave this job for one where I hopefully never have to work with the public again.

sms harassment

I was being harassed through text by a friend of my father for over a year long. I was 15 at the time the men was 52. As it started with seemingly innocent texts I managed to convince myself that my discomfort was an overreaction. Over time however it got really bad with him regularly sending me porn, pictures, links to all kind of sexual related content and self written stories about kids having seks with adults. This was a man I had grown up with and who had seen me naked from baby on to the point that it got really uncomfortable. But the bathroom doors didn’t always have a lock when our two families rented a house together. So when it got really bad I didn’t dare to tell anyone because he was a friend of my father and I was scared to mess up there relationship because of things I had convinced myself where harmless. One day I got really mad because every time he texted me I felt so disgusting and uncomfortable that it ruined my whole day. I decided to confront him as objective and adult like I could. He started guilt tripping me, telling me he was lonely, that he was in love with me and that he needed me to keep him from depression. I persisted however and got him to back off, but by the time I managed I was so shocked that I got a panic attack. This was the scariest thing that ever happend in my life but luckily my best friend came to my aid after two hours of freaking out. She gave me an ultimatum to make me tell my parents. who took me very seriously and made me go to the police after which I found out I wasn’t his first victim. He had harassed his stepdaughters in ways that were far worse than me and there were even more girls. What I never managed to tell my parents is that I have been struggling with panic attacks ever since and often don’t feel save. That my fathers touch sometimes makes me really uncomfortable even though I know he would never harm me or touch me inappropriately. It’s been getting better year by year but I realise that it will still take a lot of time as I still sometimes experience triggers. The worst thing is that I still feel like I have to defend my feelings, that I still feel like I have no right to be scared and I can’t get rid of that feeling which makes it hard to talk about.

Kritika

I was born and brought up in a very small town in Kerala. I was a big girl from a very young age (only by body size), and my breasts were bigger compared to other girls of my age during my teenage years. When I was 10 years old, I started wearing a sports bra. One day, a teacher called my mother and spoke to her in private about buying me an actual bra. She said teachers were talking about my breasts in the staff room. My mother took me out for lunch and took me bra shopping. My 11-year-old self was utterly humiliated wondering why teachers were talking about my breasts at school. I was one of the first to wear jeans and Kurti (a typical attire these days in my place). One day a lady who runs a shop on the street came and told my father that all the autorickshaw drivers who park their vehicles at the opposite end of the street were getting tempted with my breasts and so he had to make his daughter cover up her breasts with a shawl. I still wonder what was her actual problem. It’s true I’ve got stares and some weird comments from the group, but I always closed off my ears. Anyway, after the lady’s recommendation, my self-confidence went down a notch and my mother too recommended it was better to wear a shawl than create trouble.

Madeleina Kay

When I was 14 years old I was a victim of violent sexual assault. I was on holiday in Norfolk and I had gone down to the beach during the afternoon to do some sketching with my chalk pastels. A naked man, with a towel over his shoulder, approached me and stood in front of me striking poses and laughing. I tried to ignore him, but he came closer to me and gestured to me to touch his penis. I shook my head and began putting my chalk pastels back in their box, and hastily packing my possessions into my bag. He took out a note and offered me money to touch him. I grabbed my stuff and walked away as quickly as I could, but the man followed me. He grabbed me and I pushed him away and started to run. But he was faster than me, he chased me down, threw me around like a rag doll and groped me. I had my shoes in my hand (I hadn’t had time to put them back on), and I hit him with them, as hard as I could, until he let go. Then I ran, up the steps from the beach and only turned to look back once I reached the top. He was stood at the bottom, wanking himself, and screaming “Fuck me, Bitch!”. This memory is now seared on my brain forever, in disturbing detal, and often gets triggered when I visit beaches. From 2017-2019 I was full-time activist, campaigning alongside grassroots communities, in unofficial roles working with volunteers, where there were no systems of protection in place. An older male activist developed an obsession with me. It didn’t take much effort scrolling through the photos on his Facebook profile, half of which were of me, for anyone to realise he had an unhealthy fixation. He began following me around at events like he was a possessed dog, usually drunk with a bottle of coke, half of which was made up of vodka. You could smell the booze on him. He was known to be unreliable by other activists, as he would regularly disappear to go to the pub. Wherever we were, in a venue, on the train, at a demonstration, he would always try to stand or sit as close to me as possible. Then he started putting his hands on my bare legs and pressing himself into me. If I arrived at an event he would greet me by grabbing both my arms and kissing me on the lips. When I took my dog to events, he would take her lead and refuse to give her back to me. when I first told others what was happening and asked them to act to protect me, I was told that they couldn’t do anything because he was “alcoholic and emotionally vulnerable”. I was so terrified of him turning up, I started avoiding events where I knew he would be there. In 2020, he died of cancer, and I am not ashamed to admit I felt relieved. Sadly, he was not the only one. I’ve been harassed innumerable times online and in person. The worst incident was an older man sending me messages that he dreamed of marrying me and having children. He then found out my address online and started sending “gifts” and postcards to me in the post. I was terrified he would turn up at my house and I nearly called the police, but I did not – I didn’t think they could do anything to help and it would be more hassle than it was worth. He was also an alcoholic and has since died from his addiction. I have also experienced older men in positions of power behaving inappropriately towards me. One such individual, used to proclaim that he loved me when I encountered him at events and kiss me on the lips. I tried on a number of occasions to propose collaborations with his campaigning organisation but was fobbed off onto a junior member of staff and given minimal support and no promotion of the research booklet I produced – he clearly didn’t “love” me that much. I later found out that he was an old school chum of Boris Johnson when he was one of 30 attendees at his Covid-era wedding party. Another time, a privileged, white man and emeritus professor of philosophy who is regularly interviewed on radio 4 and somebody I looked up to and respected, deeply disappointed me by defending sexual harassment and mysoginist behaviour. He advised me to stop calling out incidents of street harassment on social media because it was “instinctive male behaviour” which is “to be expected” and I should “take it as a compliment” because I am an attractive young woman. I was incredulous and disgusted that someone who was so intelligent could be legitimising and condoning this sort of behaviour. But maybe I was naïve to have thought otherwise – I lost all respect for him after that conversation. But sadly, this is not a lone opinion, I have had both men and women who comment on my posts telling me that I should take harassment as “a compliment” and be “grateful” for the attention, or told that my actions in calling out abuse was “stopping their sons from getting a girlfriend”. I frequently get accused of lying and “attention seeking” for calling out incidents when they occur. There have also been incidents of people unfollowing myself and other female activists for speaking out about their experiences of sexual harassment, with a Victorian-era “women should been seen and not heard” mentality resulting in the silencing of those “outspoken women”. Personally, I have been called misogynistic insults, such as, “Prima Donna”, “Little Madam”, “Attention seeker”, “spoilt brat” and “self-publicist” by fellow campaigners, for the crime of making my voice heard above the crowd. Whereas I have witnessed male activists applauded for making virtue signalling tweets and posts about gender equality, when in reality, they have neglected opportunities to platform or support their female counterparts in any meaningful way and engaged in sexually predatory behaviour themselves. When women speak out and campaign against sexual harassment, online or in public spaces, we are demanding one thing: that we are treated with the respect we deserve. I’ve also received all manner of lewd DMs and comments on my posts, including rape threats and misogynistic trolling. One article published by Guid Fawkes (an alt-right blog) titled ‘EU Supergirl’s Randy Sugar Daddy’ which insinuated I was prostituting myself for crowdfunder donations, led to a spate of trolls calling me a “sex doll” and accusing me of prostitution. I have also had men on Twitter, mocking me for a congenital eye condition (Duane’s Syndrome) speculating about how they would like to “bend it in to [me]” another one responding that they wouldn’t be able to perform unless I closed my “skelly eyes”. During my tour of the EU27 in 2019 (funded by a ‘Democracy Needs Imagination’ grant from the European Cultural foundation), I experienced street harassment in all but one country (Sweden, where I was visited for less than 24 hours). From groups of men shouting hello across the road to wolf whistling and swearing at me, the constant nature of the macho behaviour wore me down: It made me feel singled-out, isolated, intimidated, self-conscious, anxious and fearful as I travelled alone. At the time (November 2019), I had a self-proclaimed “feminist rant” about the issue after a particularly horrific experience in Greece, and I was shocked by the response it received (193 comments on the original post – mostly from women sharing similar stories or men expressing their despair that this behaviour still occurs in the 21st century) – this helped me feel validated and not personally to blame. In my blog post I wrote, ‘I in no way want to single out Greece here, as the inherent societal misogyny which leads men to believe they are somehow entitled to sexually harass women in the streets is endemic across Europe. Ljubljana, Brussels and Frankfurt have also been especially bad in my personal experience, but Athens has been notably worse than anything I have endure before: More persistent, more aggressive and more frequent. In addition to the standard level of cat-calling and wolf-whistling that I anticipate everywhere; “Hello miss, how are you?”, “Hey! You! Hey! You! Listen to me! Hey! You’re beautiful!”, “Slow down sexy!”, etc. etc. I also had 3 particularly unpleasant experiences in less than 48 hours: Firstly, a guy following me down a road, for a good few minutes, walking by my side and constantly pestering me “Hello! Where are you going?” Etc. The second, a man stopping in the street looking me up and down and saying, “Oh God. Oh shit.” Thirdly, a man leering extremely close to my face and blowing kisses at me. I’ve also had comments shouted at me in at least 3 languages (English, French and Greek). When I have met people on my travels and I’ve told them I am travelling alone, they have expressed genuine shock at the prospect of a young woman travelling solo across Europe. Likewise: I’ve had numerous emails/messages from women telling me they think I am “brave” for travelling on my own and (this is the worst thing) also saying they would be too scared to travel alone. Perhaps I am “brave”, or perhaps stupid, maybe I’m just determined to live my dreams and deliver on my project for the European Cultural Foundation: which involves sitting in the streets of all 28 capital cities in the EU countries. And I will continue to sketch the beauty of Europe regardless of unwanted attention from guys. But it pisses me off that it changes my behaviour & stops other women from living freely. Nothing terrible has happened on my travels but the threat and associated fear of this constant street harassment is very real. I have been assaulted in the past: by a naked man, whilst sketching on a beach alone, aged 14. The memory of this trauma is always on the back of my mind when I am accosted in the streets by men. And as a woman, I hate the thought that other women, their fathers, brothers, partners, friends, etc. fear them travelling alone. So I implore them not to let it stop them living their lives – and show, by example, that a woman can be fearless in the face of this situation… But I will tell you the truth of how it makes you feel deep down; Scared, intimidated, angry, vulnerable, guilty and self-conscious. It’s not a compliment. It’s not acceptable. And it has to stop. I for one am sick of it.’ This is not just an issue which affects European countries, I have experiences incidents of street harassment across the UK. In my home city of Sheffield, walking to an open mic night during daylight hours, a drunk man made a lewd comment about my guitar and grabbed my arm. In Oxford, I sat sketching on a bench on a sunny afternoon, in a busy public space. A man sat next to me, slowly edging closer to me, he then began rolling a spliff on the bench and touched my bare thigh. Whilst out jogging, i’ve had all manner of things yelled at me from men in cars. One man pulled up next to me, told me he had seen me out running locally with my dog (who I didn’t have with me at the time) and asked me for my number, like I was a drive-by pick up, taking advantage of an opportunity when I didn’t have a large Alsation to protect me. I am eternally grateful to my dog, who can smell alcohol/drugs, for barking aggressively at men who have approached me, but I shouldn’t need a large dog with me to feel safe on the streets. Women should be allowed to walk home without fearing for their lives. This should be a basic right in any decent society. And women shouldn’t be victim blamed for male violence, as I have been. “What were you wearing?”, “I told you not to go out alone.” Etc. Women should not be punished and restricted by the actions of men. We should be allowed to sketch on the beach if we want, we should be allowed to wear whatever clothes and make-up we like without worrying about the unwanted attention we will receive, we should be allowed to travel without a chaperone, we should have the right to walk home without being attacked. I thought this behaviour was only directed at me because I was a lone female. But on a holiday in the UK with my boyfriend, I still experienced a number of incidents of men shouting at me as they drove or walked past, and a man looking me up and down then telling my boyfriend that he’s “a very lucky guy”. Which could have been interpreted as a compliment, except that being objectified isn’t really a compliment. In the fight against street harassment and sexual violence, we need men to take women’s side. And men need to listen and understand the situation from the woman’s perspective, and act to remediate the inequality. It’s not good enough to sit back and say “well I’ve never behaved like this myself” – we need your help and support. The men who respond with the comment “NOT ALL MEN” are contributing to the problem in the same way that the “ALL LIVES MATTER” brigade contribute to racial inequality. Women face this constant abuse and harassment, living their lives in fear and anxiety, suffering the consequences of systemic gender inequality from birth, and are then accused by a mysoginistic culture of being “weak”, “fragile”, “lesser beings” than men. Men need to gain more awareness of their privilege and take action to address gender inequality which still proliferates throughout our patriarchal society. If home is somewhere you feel safe and secure, my country certainly doesn’t feel like a place that I can call home. But then I wonder where in the world does feel safe for women and girls?

Adr

I happened to be on a crowded bus on my way back to school when I was 17. A man stood right behind me and placed his hands on my waist as he was getting even closer and closer and eventually started to practically grind on me. I initially froze and did not know what to do but when I finally got the courage to ask him to leave me alone he just laughed in my face. I looked around in the bus trying to find someone that might help and I noticed that everyone had seen what was happening and yet nobody did anything. When I got off the bus the man followed me and grabbed my hand telling me to come with him. I repeatedly said no and asked him to leave me alone but he would not let go of my hand. Eventually, some stranger grabbed him behind his back and told me to run off as fast as I could.

E

Friend was out for a run and had two incidents of being wanked at – one by a man in a car, and one by a group of teenagers about two weeks later. In the same time period, I got stopped by a couple of lads in a car and asked where “Titty Lane” was – and I felt pretty unsafe because it’s the part of the walk I do without any houses around. Friends and younger sisters have also encountered gross comments outside the shop in the last couple of months. It’s weird because up until now our village has felt like a safe haven away from this much overt harassment. Not anymore.

Hannah

I was on a train. There was only one seat left on the carriage and a man took it I was 16 at the time, he was maybe 20. He offered the seat to me and I declined, saying that I was fine with standing, he got there first. Then he jokingly asked me to sit on his lap. I laughed nervously and said no again. For the next 15 minutes, until he got off at his stop, he kept going, kept asking me to sit on his lap, joking about how he couldn’t let a poor woman stand. I think it became obvious that I was deeply uncomfortable after he first minute. After he left, I felt ashamed and deeply embarrassed. Another woman had watched the whole thing and stayed silent which made be feel more mortified, not because I blamed her, but felt embarrassed that someone else had even seen it. I initially didn’t tell anyone, and thought that it was somehow my fault, but as I got older, I look back and like to think that if that were to happen to me today, I’d have enough confidence to shut him down.