Today on Twitter Hollaback organized a Tweetup using the hashtag #harassmentis. The topic of harassment has spurred a number of vibrant and illuminating hashtags in the past year, #fasttailedgirls and #shoutingback among two of the most notable. Today's panel brought together a diverse group of activists to talk about the role race plays, everyone's race -- harassers and harassed alike -- in street harassment. ntil women are able to move freely without the ubiquitous threat of gendered violence in public space, we cannot engage fully in public life. This is true offline and on. It's part of a near universal safety gap. To understand street harassment you really have to put it in the context of how violence against women, members of the LGTBQ community, and people of color is institutionalized and broadly expressed. It is the normalization of gendered violence that manifests, on our streets every day, racist, sexist status quo ideas about rights, hierarchy and power. #Harassmentis...
#1: Harassment is infused with dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality and power and how those ideas relate to the identities of the harassed and the harassing.
#2: Ignored or misrepresented as an "over there" problem in media.
#3: Harassment is expensive and inhibiting.
#4: Street harassment enforces heteronormativity, which is also an expression of patriarchal dominance.
#5: Harassment is often not only ignored and tolerated by the police and people with authority to confront it, but often involves the them.
#6: Harassment is a global problem for girls and women. While men, particularly gay and transgender men are targeted in high proportions, it is usually by men. Girls and women are generally not harassing people, grabbing their bodies or otherwise threatening them in public -- muttering obscenities, making pornographic suggestions, touching people they don't know in intimate ways, lurking on stoops, staring from benches, and following girls in cars.
#7. Harassment is not flattery and "compliments" don't scare people or make them uncomfortable.
#8: Harassment is something everyone's silent about, even thought it is a public issue.
#9: Street harassment has nothing to do with what a person is wearing.
#10: Street harassment gets its power from the threat of violence.
See entire post with embedded tweets about all of these here.
