Stop Whistling, Start Listening

Street harassment

Over the past year or so some fantastic campaigns have really come to prominence in relation to tackling street harassment. 

It’s a tricky issue because it’s so unbelievably prevalent that it has become normalised completely. It doesn’t occur to women to actually complain about it or object to it a lot of the time. It’s just part of life, part of being a woman. In addition to this, men who do it (and many who don’t) don’t recognise it as being harassment. How can a wolf-whistle be harassment? How can complimenting a woman on her body or how she looks be offensive? 

I’m really happy that it’s finally something which is being talked about and challenged. Like others, I’d always put up with it and assumed it was part of life. Being Irish, I went to an all-girls school which was regularly plagued by flashers. Every few months we’d all be informed that a girl had been flashed on one of the various routes away from the school and would be warned off going that way. In some cases, girls were sexually assaulted by school boys (a friend of mine walked by a lone boy on her way home and before she could stop him he’d reached out and quickly put his hands on her vagina, before walking on). As I got older I began to get the usual harassment - car horns beeping at me as I walked down the road, groups of guys yelling comments, wolf whistles etc.

I never reported it to anyone or complained to my parents as it was just normal. All the girls got it. We got it on our own, and we got it when we went out in groups. But it did affect my self-esteem. It didn’t make me feel hot, or admired. It made me feel vulnerable, self-conscious and intimidated. I remember job-hunting in Boston one summer, walking around in a short-black skirt and short-sleeved blouse and being whistled at and commented on by builders. It shattered the confidence I was desperately trying to cultivate to get a job. Later, back in Dublin, I experienced the darker side of street harassement. I was slapped in a club one night for refusing to dance with a man (the bouncers, to their credit, swiftly ejected him), I was called a stuck-up bitch, a dyke bitch and any other assortment of names for not ‘taking a compliment’ or having a ‘sense of humour’. Moving to London 8 years ago did not improve matters. Walking through central London after dark, no matter how I was dressed, would leave me open to comments and leers. Brixton became a no-go area for me completely - for some reason I really couldn’t walk down a street in that area without being whistled, hissed or clicked at, like a dog.

These are just my experiences but it’s important to say that they’re not uncommon. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t have similar tales to tell. And it’s not because I dress ‘provocatively’. It’s not because I’m particularly sexy, or striking, or beautiful. It’s simply because I’m a woman.

In my experience, men need to understand two things about why it’s not a compliment or a bit of fun:

• When it’s constant and regular, it takes its toll. Your single comment or whistle in and of itself may not be wildly offensive but taken in the context of experiencing it regularly or even daily, it leaves women feeling incredibly self-conscious. Every walk down the street leaves you feeling open to being judged, assessed and open to inviting comment. It leaves you feeling like an object, there for nothing more than to entertain the men you pass. It’s exhausting.

• Women never know where it’s going to lead. If you put your head down and ignore them, they sense your vulnerability and that encourages them to get worse or more explicit. Sometimes if you respond in anger (a simple ‘fuck off’ for example) they’ll find getting a reaction hilarious, and get worse. If you ignore them, you risk angering them or ‘provoking’ them into calling you stuck-up or a bitch. Sometimes if you respond it angers them. How dare you talk back! How dare you challenge them! If you’re particularly unlucky, they’ll get violent. You see where I’m going with this? Women don’t know how to react because it can go anywhere and most women have experienced a range of reactions. It may seem funny or inoffensive to the men who do it, but it’s threatening and intimidating for the women who experience it.

Thankfully there are people battling to raise this as an issue and push the point of how women feel about it. The London iHollaback site  was inspired by the one started in New York and founded by Julia Gray and Bryony Beynon. While the NY one was originally a place where women could post pictures of harassers and tell their tales of fighting back, the London one is more a place where women tell their stories of harassment. The organisers don’t necessarily encourage photos to be taken as it can put the woman at risk of reaction from the men involved but it is both comforting and depressing to read through the tales of women’s experiences in London.

The ASH Campaign (Anti-Street Harassment Campaign) was founded by Vicky Simister, originally as a London focused organisation but which has since branched out nationally. Vicky has done fantastic work in the last year raising the profile of street harassment as a problem and challenging the notion that it’s a compliment or all we need is a sense of humor about it. The ASH campaign is also trying to tackle it through education of young boys and girls about acceptable behaviour, and in trying to get politicians to accept that it’s a problem in the first place.

For me though, the most important way to challenge street harassment is to talk about it. Tell your stories to your friends - men and women. Other women will find relief in acknowledging that they don’t find it funny or complimentary either. Men on the other hand need to know how prevalent it is and how often their sisters, wives, girlfriends, daughters and all women experience it. So I would encourage you all to go out and talk about it. What happened to you today? And how did it make you feel? Get chatting and let’s try and break the cycle of totally normalising street harassment.