Women and Everyday Harassment on the Street

This writing is my personal experience and it may or may not be a shared experience of other females. My intentions are to educate the public about a well known issue that needs to be discussed. Knowledge can be power as long as information is absorbed and action taken to correct our current standpoint.
According to StreetHarassmentProject.org website, street harassment is defined as "women being terrorized daily in public spaces, our personal space violated by men who block our paths, stand too close, use a too intimate and insulting language toward us..."¹

This sounds all to familiar. On a daily bases women and girls hear these comments when working out, going to class, or running errands. Living their lives, guys comes by in his car and whistles, you try to ignore it but when it happens everyday it gets hard. Whistling is the very minimum that is done. Being called a bitch, ho, etc. and worst case scenario guys trying to physically abuse use daily in public. You as a female feel helpless, the law does not do anything because the guys are random and law enforcement thinks your treatment is based on what you wear. The actions makes you fearful to leave the house or to even ask for help when needed (there is a sense that no one cares). I do not know what other women and girls do but as a temporary solution because I have to take public transportation was to carry a camera (broken) but the guys on the street do not know that. I would act as if I was taking their picture and they would speed off. This gave me a sense of power, even though I know tomorrow it will happen again.

The root of this steams from television, music, and film. The idea that women want to be taken even if they say "no." The idea that women are only worth their bodies. Women are deserve to be treated this way because of how they dress. I, typically wore khaki pants and polo shirt and carried a backpack, when did prostitutes start to wear these clothes. The answer to this is they don't. I started to relate this behavior to my skin color (not trying to play the race card). Being a black women, the media turns us into sex objects only never as intellectuals (there seems to never be balance within character roles). The idea that we are oversexed, from the housing projects and on welfare. All these stereotypes contributes our place in society and why we are degraded more than any other group of women. Not to say that other female groups are not important but I feel that we get harassed more often because of the media.

This needs to be stopped, not in the future but now. We (I do mean all of us) can not let another generation of women and girls go through this. Keep in mind we are all someones daughter, sister, wife, girlfriend, aunt, and/or cousin.
One thing that can be done is to join in the fight against street harassment on streetharassment.org (women and men need to join this fight).

Reference Cite
1 The Street Harassment Coalition. www.streetharassment.org. (accessed June 5,2007)