Niamh

I have just returned from my first ever holiday abroad without my parents, and whilst I had an amazing time overall, I feel that some of the behaviour that my friend and I experienced may have tainted these memories. We have just finished secondary school and decided that we should travel to a few places in Italy to celebrate. Whilst we expected that as young females, we may have to be slightly more cautious than if we were travelling with our families, I was not prepared for the sheer amount of minor instances of sexism that we encountered.

For instance, in Naples, our first destination, we were catcalled many times a day (on one occasion, we counted over ten separate examples within half an hour). These ranged from simply, ‘ciao’, to highly explicit sexual comments, sometimes leading to groping.
I am aware that my experiences are not the most severe or shocking, however they made us feel very unsafe and forced us to restrict where and when we could go out (which I personally don’t believe would have been the case had we been accompanied by a man).

One of our main reasons for deciding to go abroad was to find freedom and independence, but sadly, our ability to achieve this was limited due to unnecessary sexist remarks. Something which may have seemed like a harmless compliment to the perpetrators, when combined with other factors, effectively ruined some aspects of our holiday, which seems very unfair to me, and of course parallels what many people (particularly women) experience throughout their entire lives.