Sister act: Women take on street harassers

Julia Gray (left) and Bryony Beynon of Hollaback! LDN Whether it's cat calls, wolf whistles or, in extreme cases, lewd acts, all women encounter street harassment at one time or another. Now

a new website, Hollaback!, is encouraging women to share their experiences and expose the culprits. Here, the two women who set up the London branch explain why it's time to reclaim the streets. Pssst. Oi, beautiful… Where you going?" "Have you got a boyfriend?" "Why won't you talk to me?" Do these questions sound familiar? Almost every woman you know will have been the recipient of her own variation on a theme: unwanted attention when she's walking down the street, dished out without warning, often followed by abuse when the stranger's demands for her time aren't met. Most women try to ignore the catcalls and groping; occasionally we flip. Such as the time I was walking down Oxford Street in central London and passed a man who thought it perfectly OK to pat my bum as he went by. Enraged, I turned to him and, in a fit of strange inspiration, threw his hat under a bus. Cool and collected I was not, but perhaps Mr Baseball Cap will now think twice before touching a woman he doesn't know. But now there's a new way to deal with street harassment that isn't limited to suffering in silence or dispensing of headwear. An anti-harassment movement called Hollaback! is encouraging women to make a noise about unwelcome whistles, jokes, jeers and obscenities. The campaign has swiftly captured the imaginations of women from London to Mumbai, Montreal to Paris, Texas to Buenos Aires, but it started, like so many wonderful things, in New York.

"A friend of mine was riding the train into work when she saw a man masturbating in the train across from her," explains Emily May, executive director of Hollaback! "She took a picture and brought it to the police, but they didn't do anything. So she posted the picture on Flickr, and it quickly went viral and landed on the front cover of the Daily News. All of a sudden the whole city was talking about public harassment, and women everywhere were telling stories." May realised the importance of sharing these experiences and Hollaback! was established as an online forum where women could exchange tales of the harassment they'd suffered, often by uploading pictures of the offender. That was in 2005, and since the birth of Hollaback! New York, the site has spread internationally. Last year was its most successful, with 10 sites launching in cities including El Paso and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the launch of a Hollaback! app developed to combat street harassment on the go. The London branch, run by students Julia Gray, 23, and Bryony Beynon, 25, launched last April in conjunction with nail salon WAH (which stands for We Ain't Hoes) in Dalston. Gray's motivation for setting up the UK branch is wearingly familiar: "I was 14 the first time a man made comments about me on the street. One even tried to follow me home." Men who harass, says Gray, are defensive and confused when confronted. May also points to numerous examples of men being surprised when challenged: "They say, 'But I love women – I have a daughter!' They often have no idea that what they're doing hurts women." Hollaback! isn't just about fighting back but about rebuilding the foundations of what people consider appropriate public behaviour. "People need to understand that street harassment has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power," says Beynon. "When was the last time you asked a friend how they met their boyfriend and they responded: 'He was driving past me and shouted "Nice tits!" out of his window, and it just went from there'?" Twenty-nine-year-old Argentinian Inti Maria Tidball-Binz has kickstarted Hollaback! in her home city of Buenos Aires. "Spanish-speaking countries call street harassment piropo, which unhelpfully also means a short poem that compliments the recipient," says Binz. "For this reason, the question I am asked most frequently is why am I so against the 'harmlessly flirtatious' piropo. Street harassment is not a poetic artform but rather on the scale of a kind of systematic violence against women."
Hollaback! also has a branch in Mumbai, where street harassment has the cute-sounding name of "Eve teasing". "It's a term which harks back to a biblical interpretation of Eve as a seductive temptress who is responsible for the behaviour of the men around her," explains 23-year-old Aisha Zakira, a columnist and the founder of Hollaback! Mumbai. "Trivialised" is a word Zakira uses frequently to describe the way in which street harassment is dealt with in India; it is seen as the "price you pay" for being a woman. "The word 'teasing' trivialises an act that, as women who have experienced it know, is isolating, painful and deeply frustrating. Not to mention frightening." The long-term effects, says Zakira, result in women becoming less visible on the streets of Mumbai or only feeling safe when travelling in groups.
One of Hollaback!'s defining features is that it offers an environment in which women can share their experiences, taking the grinding negativity of street harassment and turning it into something positive. Zakira's goals for the site are twofold: "First and foremost, to provide a safe space for women to tell their stories, so that they feel less alone. And in the longer term, we hope to use the site to push legislators for larger policy change – even things as simple as better lighting and safe public toilets." Anna Gautheron only learned what the term "street harassment" meant when she read about it online. "It spoke to me because I experienced it very often," explains the 25-year-old graduate, currently running Hollaback! France from Lyon. "But when I looked for information in France, I found virtually nothing. Yet all my female friends and I had at least one street-harassment story to tell. I found the lack of resources for such a widespread phenomenon striking. I decided it was time for me to get involved. "French women are expected to follow some rules once they're outdoors," she explains. "They are told not to be too loud, too pretty, too much out of the ordinary. We have learned to walk fast, not to make eye contact, and be invisible. People often think that women are harassed when they don't follow these rules and that it is somehow their fault. The truth is that there is only one reason why someone is harassed on the street: they encounter a harasser."