It's So Hard to Find Good Help These Days

I am 15 right now, and at the time of this "incident" I was 14. The scene is just out in downtown Darien, Connecticut, which is a pretty safe state if I do say so myself. I was waiting on a bench right next to a family restaurant FULL of people, while my friends left to go to a Starbucks not 50 yards away. While I was sitting and waiting for my parents to pick me up, I noticed two "gentlemen" come up to me. They said a few sentences, but all I managed to get out was "Are you alright? You sure look alright. You want us to wait with you?" All the while they kept leering at me and smiling, and I could tell they were smashed. I just kept saying "I'm fine, I'm okay" until they crossed the street. I immediately went to go to my friends at the Starbucks and I said "Those drunk guys were hitting on me" to which a guy friend of mine responded "Those weren't just any drunk guys, those were firemen!"


Originally posted by HollaBackNYC

Connecticut, It's Time to HOLLA BACK!

The site is up and running. I am still working on gathering resources and support for street harassment, so stay tuned for that!

If you currently have stories and/or pics of Connecticut street harassment, send them to HollaBackCT@gmail.com

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I submit a story I have of street harassment?
Email stories and/or pictures to HollaBackCT@gmail.com

Is it anonymous?
Yes. We would never post your name or email address with your story. This is all about your safety for goodness sakes :) However if you don't mind the post saying, "Posted by Samantha" at the bottom, just let us know and we'll write your first name.

What is HollaBack?
HollaBack is a collective comprised of women and men who believe in building communities where everyone is comfortable, safe, and respected. Many people are unaware of the frequency and severity of disrespect and intimidation that numerous folks, especially women and other marginalized groups, experience in public spaces on a daily basis. HollaBack aims to expose and combat street harassment as well as provide an empowering forum in this struggle. HollaBackCT is a watch-dog blog that serves to call out all forms of street harassment that occurs specifically in Connecticut.

What is street harassment?
Street harassment is a form of sexual harassment that takes place in public spaces. At its core, street harassment is a power dynamic that constantly reminds historically subordinated groups (women and LGBTQ folks, for example) of their vulnerability to assault. Further, it reinforces the ubiquitous sexual objectification of these groups in everyday life. At HollaBackNYC, they believe that what specifically counts as street harassment is determined by those who experience it, and HollaBackCT agrees. While there is always the classic, “Hey baby, nice tits” there are so many other forms that go unnoted. If you feel like you have been harassed in any way, HOLLA BACK!

What does racism have to do with street harassment?
Replacing sexism with racism is not a proper holla back. Due in part to prevalent stereotypes of men of color as sexual predators or predisposed to violence, HollaBackCT asks that contributors do not discuss the race of harassers or include other racialized commentary. If you feel that race is important to your story, please make sure its relevance is explained clearly and constructively in your post.

Aren't you just dismissing and belittling another person’s culture with your definition of street harassment?
Street harassers occupy the full spectrum of class, race, and ethnicity. Sexual harassment, and street harassment specifically, is resisted around the world. To condense another’s culture into vague assumptions about who and what they are is to generalize dangerously about a wide range of experiences and perspectives.

Confronting street harassers can be dangerous. What about safety issues?
While everyone is vulnerable to stranger rape and sexual assault, studies show that those who are aware of their surroundings, walk with confidence and, if harassed, respond assertively, are less vulnerable. Nevertheless, direct confrontations with street harassers may prove extremely dangerous, particularly alone or in unpopulated spaces. While it is each individual’s right to decide when, how, and if to Holla Back, do keep issues of safety in mind. Upon deciding to photograph a harasser, you may consider doing so substantially after the initial encounter and from a distance, ensuring the harasser is unaware of your actions.

Does my Holla Back have to be about an incident in Connecticut?
Well no, of course not :) This site's focus will be primarily CT but we will accept stories about any location. However, if your incident is about an experience in another city that has a Holla Back site, please feel free to email them (see other Holla Back site's linked on the main page).

Don't women like the attention they get? Why else would they dress like that? Also heard as "If you show off your boobage, shouldn’t you expect some compliments?"
Sure, expect them, but don’t accept them! Just because it happens doesn’t mean it’s okay. A compliment is not a compliment if it makes the recipient feel uncomfortable. How a woman (or man) is dressed is never an invitation for street harassment, offensive conversation, flirting, groping, or any sort of unsolicited attention.

These FAQs are adapted from HollaBackNYC

Antiracism

Replacing sexism with racism is not a proper holla back.

Due in part to prevalent stereotypes of men of color as sexual predators or predisposed to violence, HollaBackCT asks that contributors do not discuss the race of harassers or include other racialized commentary.

If you feel that race is important to your story, please make sure its relevance is explained clearly and constructively in your post.

Initiatives combating various forms of sexual harassment and assault have continually struggled against the perpetuation of racist stereotypes, in particular the construction of men of color as sexual predators. There exist widespread fictions regarding who perpetrators are: the myth of racial minorities, particularly Latino and Black men, as prototypical rapists as well as more prone to violence is quite common. This stems in part from a tragic and violent history, where black men in the U.S. were commonly and unjustly accused of assaulting white women as well as lynched by mobs and “tried” in biased courts.

Because of the complexity of institutional and socially ingrained prejudices, Holla Back prioritizes resisting both direct as well as unconscious and unintentional reinforcement of social hierarchies. Simultaneously, Holla Back aims to highlight the interrelations between sexism, racism and other forms of bias and violence.

Further Reading:

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” Short, accessible piece on white privilege and male privilege.

A Black Feminist Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment

Focuses on the experiences of black lesbians and the need for black women to hold black men accountable for upholding black patriarchy.

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color

Considers the intersections of racism and patriarchy, and how the experiences of women of color remain unrepresented within the discourses of both feminism and antiracism.

Current Remedies and Their Failures

Currently, a number of legal tools exist to combat street harassment. While some of these have proved successful on occasion, none are an effective remedy in part due to factors described below. It should be noted, however, that there exists one particular area where women have been extended greater protection: common carriers (buses, trains, and other transportation forms) and hotel guest situations. Women may recover damages more readily if harassed by an employee—or even another patron—of a common carrier or hotel. More information on this follows below.

Criminal Remedies

Although they do not provide monetary damage awards, criminal remedies include the advantage of an attorney provided by the state free of charge. However, the judges, state attorneys, and police officers responsible for criminal street harassment cases are the same personnel who have often notoriously failed to take seriously even cases of brutal sexual assault. Thus, women may be reluctant or unable to bring such cases in criminal court.

Potential criminal remedies include:

* Assault
* State statutes prohibiting harassment in public places. For New York’s statute, click here (i'll search for CT asap).
* “Fighting words” statutes
* Anti-stalking statutes

Civil Remedies

Civil remedies have the benefit of monetary compensation in the form of damages. If sufficiently large, such damages may provide a larger deterrent than criminal prosecution alone.

Potential civil remedies include:

* Assault
* Intentional infliction of emotional distress
* Invasion of Privacy

Failures of Current Remedies

None of these remedies have yet been very useful in combating street harassment. This is in large part due to the effects of racism and sexism on the courts’ application of the law.

Race

Consider an early criminal case in which the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the assault conviction of a black man who harassed a fifteen-year-old white girl on the street. In its decision, the court stated, “[a] negro man, using this foul indecent language towards a young white girl, as a matter of common knowledge, would create apprehension and fear.” State v. Williams, 120 S.E. 224, 228 (N.C. 1923).

However, courts have been willing to react quite differently when the harasser is white and the targeted woman is black. In one New York criminal harassment case, the defendant, described by the court as a “lone white suburban male,” backed his “expensive foreign car” along a curb at 3 a.m. and solicited three black women he allegedly believed to be prostitutes. Harassment charges against him were dismissed, though, on the grounds that it was not his intent to annoy, but only to seek “female companionship.” This decision neatly dovetails with the common racist stereotypes regarding the sexual promiscuity and accessibility of women of color.

Sexism and the “Reasonable Man” Standard

New York, like a number of states, actually has a statute that specifically prohibits harassment. According to the court in the above case, however, although the man’s behavior might technically be prohibited by the statute, the statute must be read as barring only “‘language or conduct . . . by its nature . . . of a sort that is a substantial interference with (our old friend) the reasonable man.’” People v. Malausky, 485 N.Y.S.2d 925, 927-28 (Rochester City Ct. 1985).

This is known as the “reasonable man standard,” a legal decision-making approach in which the court asks how a reasonable man would act under the circumstances. Although today the terminology has been altered to “reasonable person,” decision-makers nevertheless often ignore the experiences of women and other historically subordinated groups in applying this standard.

In this case, for instance, the court felt that “a reasonable man” would not consider the solicitation to prostitution by a wealthy white man on the street at night a substantial interference for a black woman. The court’s old friend “the reasonable man” is clearly no friend of ours. This case illustrates the sexist fashion in which the reasonable man standard (as well as the revised reasonable person standard) is likely to be applied by a mostly male judiciary, and the race and class biases ubiquitous in the enforcement of anti-harassment statutes.

Street Harassment as Trivial

There exist very few reported street harassment cases in which convictions have been upheld. As a dissenting judge in one of these rare examples indicated, it seems to be the pervasiveness of street harassment that contributes to its neglect by the law. Referring to the fact that women are frequently assaulted with catcalls and sexual suggestions, he asserted that a mere indecent request was insufficient to violate the anti-harassment statute in question. Commonwealth v. Duncan, 363 A.2d 803, 804-05 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1976). He also felt it would be unwise to criminalize such behavior because: “(1) the state runs the risk of criminalizing generally accepted behavior, leaving the actor without reasonable notice that his conduct is criminal; (2) such incidents are too frequent for a justice system to handle them efficiently; (3) courts cannot be expected to arbitrate what are frequently personal disputes by use of the criminal process.” Duncan at 804-05. Since street harassment is so widespread and generally regarded as trivial, this judge feels that there is no reason to do anything about it legally.

The same attitudes that permit and foster street harassment in the first place thus also permeate the legal system, creating a serious impediment to the successful use of any existing remedies against street harassment. Take for example the civil remedy of “intentional infliction of emotional distress, which is defined as “extreme and outrageous conduct [that] intentionally or recklessly causes severe emotional distress to another,” Restatement (Second) of Torts. Street harassment as experienced by countless women clearly fits this definition, yet there are few reported cases in which this remedy has been successfully used in a street harassment context. Much of the difficulty lies in establishing street harassment constitutes “extreme and outrageous conduct.” After all, if street harassment was generally regarded as “extreme and outrageous,” it wouldn’t present such an omnipresent problem.

However, common carriers and hotels have a higher responsibility for the actions of their employees and, in some cases, even their patrons if the company in question was required to train employees to intervene in harassment situations. Thus, when a special relationship exists between the woman and defendant—such as guest and hotel, or passenger and common carrier— establishing liability involves proving only that the conduct was “gross” rather than “extreme and outrageous.”

This lower standard has enabled women to obtain damages from companies for the actions of their employees and patrons in some situations. Yet, as long as courts continue to view street harassment through a lens of complacency distorted by racist and sexist presumptions, legal redress will be difficult to obtain for most of those forced to endure such harassment.

Further Resources:

Crime Prevention Resources
http://criminal.findlaw.com/crimes/crime_prevention.html
Crime Victim Resources
http://criminal.findlaw.com/crimes/crime_victims.html
Annotated Bibliography: Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence
http://www.siecus.org/pubs/biblio/bibs0022.html

This is stolen entirely from the wonderful men and women at HollaBackNYC

Street Harassment: The Failure of the Law to Protect Women

Although compiled by HollabackNYC’s legal team, this document is an informational resource, not legal advice. If you are considering legal action, contact an attorney who specializes in harassment law and who can advise you on the particulars of your case.

The law has historically failed to take seriously numerous issues affecting women’s lives, and street harassment is no exception. Although several legal remedies could potentially be employed to combat street harassment, the current state of the legal system makes success highly unlikely.

Judges, legislators, and other decision-makers—mostly male—have generally understood street harassment as a trivial occurrence and thus not within the proper scope of the law. In turn, even laws already on the books that prohibit intimidation and harassment are rarely interpreted to address the harms of street harassment experienced by women. The application of existing legal remedies to street harassment experienced by LGBTQ individuals is an even more remote possibility, although legislation prohibiting hate crimes and hate speech may provide additional recourse in these cases. For more information on this, click here.

Given the shortcomings of the law in this arena, a number of legal scholars and activists have suggested specific legal reforms that have yet to be implemented. For a thorough review of current legal concepts used against street harassment and their failures, as well as proposed remedies, see Cynthia Grant Bowman’s “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women,” published in the Harvard Law Review and available here.