sexual harassment

Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

mandy — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0000

By Meghan Huppuch, Mandy Van Deven, Joanne N. Smith

Difficulties concentrating in school, shame, depression, guilt, fear, low self-esteem, poor body image, and powerlessness are just some of the repercussions that victims of sexual harassment at school experience, according to research conducted by Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). This Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization works to “improve gender and race relations and socioeconomic conditions for [the] most vulnerable youth and communities of color.” Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Megan Huppuch of GGE have collaboratively written Hey, Shorty!, which tells GGE’s story, while providing a model for teens to teach their peers what constitutes sexual harassment and how to prevent it. The book also gives activists, educators, parents and students a hands-on guide to combat sexual harassment and violence in their schools and neighborhoods.

In September 2001, just a few months after GGE had started meeting to play basketball, an 8-year-old girl was raped on her way to school in the area. In response to the victim blaming that GGE founder Joanne Smith heard, she decided to discuss gender stereotypes and discrimination with the girls in the league. This evolved into Gender Respect Workshops, developed and facilitated by Mandy Van Deven with male and female students in the classroom. She discovered that sexual harassment was a major issue in the lives of the students, particularly girls and LGBTQ youth. Soon after, the Sisters in Strength program was born, and today it has become a paid year-long internship for teen girls of color to advocate for the enforcement of sexual harassment policies in New York City public schools through workshops and direct action.

Sisters in Strength’s first task was to raise awareness about the problem in the community, which led to their making Hey... Shorty!, a short film that later won Best Youth Documentary at the Roxbury Film Festival. They screened their film at the Street Harassment Summit, where they shared what they had learned with other members of the community.

A second Sisters in Strength project involved hands-on participatory action research. The teen interns collected information through surveys, focus groups, and slam books, or notebooks with written prompts that students can respond to anonymously. After compiling their data, they concluded that sexual harassment was rampant and normalized. Their research results were presented at GGE's Gender Equality Festival to other community organizations. Under Meghan Huppuch’s leadership, GGE went on to form the Coalition for Gender Equity in Schools with more than twenty other area organizations.

The work of GGE may well have given us the solution to bullying that we have so desperately sought. When we are sexually harassed, we believe we are alone and somehow deserve this treatment. In other words, we internalize our pain and suffer in silence. But from GGE’s research and community action, we see that this pervasive problem lies not within the person being harassed, but with the external forces that perpetuate and enable sexual harassment to exist in our schools and on our streets.

GGE is an empowering initiative for teens, our future leaders, and Hey, Shorty! is an essential resource for parents, teachers and community leaders who want to take action against bullying and sexual harassment in their communities. Chock full of capacity-building activities and ideas, Hey, Shorty! is indispensable for anyone who wants to create an environment where everyone thrives.

Written by: Heather Leighton, April 30th 2011

Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women

priyanka — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Holly Kearl

Praeger

Street harassment is rampant in all parts of the world—from New York City to Tokyo to Cairo—yet it is still accepted globally. This largely ignored problem is thoroughly discussed and analyzed in Holly Kearl’s book entitled, Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women. Defined by Kearl in the first chapter as “unwanted attention” in public places, street harassment includes and is not limited to “physically harmless leers, whistles, honks, kissing noises, and nonsexually explicit evaluative comments,” but also extends to “more insulting and threatening behavior like vulgar gestures, sexually charged comments, flashing, and stalking, to illegal actions like public masturbation, sexual touching, assault, and rape.” Many (if not most) women experience it; very few men know about it.

The second chapter explains the context in which street harassment occurs. If a young girl, perhaps wearing a short skirt, walks alone on a street at night and is sexually assaulted, she would most likely be blamed for the assault, right? Wrong, Kearl tells us; her clothing and time she chose to walk outside is not her fault that she was sexually assaulted. As someone who lived in a small town in Morocco for half a year, I can attest that I wore conservative clothes yet still experienced men whistling and throwing rocks at me in the light of the day. Therefore, Kearl explains, street harassment is a power dynamic that shows which gender wields more power and control in a given society.

Yet street harassment is not just a gendered issue; it is multi-layered with race, socioeconomic status, gender expression, and disability, as Kearl writes in the third chapter. It is “a global problem,” as the title of the fourth chapter states. It not only happens in cities, it is more likely to happen wherever women are alone and/or traveling in public by taxi, public transportation, and on foot.

More than Kearl’s analysis and extensive research about the topic, the quotations that she includes throughout the book helps the reader to understand why street harassment is a big problem. These quotations are from Kearl’s surveys of people (the majority women) who experienced sexual harassment in public places. You can read more information about her surveys online. These written experiences illuminate women’s views and thoughts about harassment which Kearl explains in the fifth chapter that can vary from woman to woman.

Women view street harassment differently and therefore they deal with street harassment differently. Kearl notes in the sixth chapter that some women choose to ignore it; others choose to directly address the harasser. A missing link in solving the street harassment issue, as explained in the seventh chapter, is to include male allies by educating and engaging them that street harassment is not okay. Equally important in combating this problem is empowering women and raising public awareness, which Kearl gives specific ideas and suggestions as to how to do this in the eighth and ninth chapters respectively. Finally, in the tenth chapter, Kearl notes that we must make street harassment an issue. If we shrug it to the side and ignore it, we are making a statement that street harassment is okay.

I suggest that everyone—women and especially men (because street harassment needs male allies)—pick up a copy of Kearl’s book to understand the complexities of street harassment and why it should not be ignored any longer. More importantly, though, after reading Stop Street Harassment, think about what you can do to stop street harassment in your own community. Because street harassment is not going to go away—and the time to take action is now!

Cross-posted at Gender Across Borders

Written by: Emily Heroy, November 12th 2010

Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:53:00 +0000

By Marnia Lazreg

Princeton University Press

We are not [wo] men for whom it is a question of either-or. For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but go beyond it. _ — Aime Cesaire, _Discourse on Colonialism

These are the words that begin the autobiographical journey Questioning the Veil, where Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-American professor of sociology at the City University of New York, touches on one of the most sensitive strings of Islam, the hijab.

Is veiling mandatory for all Muslim women or is it a cultural, political, or a social practice? Lazreg presents her research in the form of a collection of letters, where each letter analyzes interviews with several Muslim women combined with Lazreg’s personal experiences growing up in a Muslim family. From modesty and sexual harassment to cultural identity, Lazreg distills the very many explanations used in adorning the veil to deconstruct its religious substantiation.

Lazreg further analyzes modesty and its association with the veiling practice. She poses questions: if modesty is a prime explanation given for wearing the veil, would a woman who does not wear a veil, but dresses conservatively be considered immodest? Similarly, what if a woman wears the veil, but is immodest in her mannerisms. As more and more prepubescent girls are being made to wear the veil based on the notion of modesty, Lazreg points out some of the mind-boggling questions that had disturbed her back in the days when she was coerced to adorn the veil upon reaching puberty.

As a child, Lazreg often questioned the partial adoption of the veil amongst the global Muslim women. As she grew older and sexual harassment was revealed to be another factor leading to the hijab, she often questioned the men who continued to harass women wrapped up in hijabs.

From the ‘reveiling’ trend in the West to the imposition of veiling laws in Islamic countries, Lazreg reveals how coercion more often than choice or faith ultimately results in veiling. Yet, using the veil to strike against anti-Muslim prejudice in the West or rejuvenate the Muslim civilization is not a means to women’s liberation. Ultimately, Lazreg’s research depicts how the practice of veiling is constructed out of reasons external to what a Muslim woman really wants to do. Until states mandate veiling by law, as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or prohibit veiling by law, as in France, Muslim women will never realize the meaning of autonomy and choice. Their human rights will remain marginalized.

Wearing the veil is not the triumph of Islam over its detractors. At the present historical conjuncture, it degrades Islam to the level of a creed and impoverishes its humanistic import. This is time for women to free themselves of it and by the same token free men, too.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Maria Khan, October 17th 2009

The Naughty Kitchen With Chef Blythe Beck

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:53:00 +0000

By Chef Blythe Beck

Oxygen

Oxygen devised a new show from a most novel idea: produce a “food show” as a documentary, or in their terms, as a “docu-series.” The show, The Naughty Kitchen, has the drama of the popular Top Chef without the competition. Instead, it delves into the mania and frenzy of the restaurant business from Chef Blythe Beck’s perspective. Chef Beck was recently named executive chef of the highly regarded Dallas restaurant, Central 214. The docu-series, therefore, documents Chef Beck’s ascension to the role of executive chef, as well as the trials and tribulations that await her in her quest to achieve, in her words, “total world culinary domination.” In a nutshell, think female chef bildungsroman—or, in this case, bildungsTV.

Yesterday Oxygen premiered the first episode of the series for bloggers in New York City. The first episode is driven by the plot line of Chef Beck’s, and Central 214’s, first major culinary review in the Dallas Morning News. Being the first episode, of course, the episode spends the necessary time introducing the show’s cast of characters: here, in addition to Chef Beck, kudos goes to the so-called “Door Whores” Emily and (new hire) Curtis, who pass their time out in front of the restaurant by entertaining themselves in the most hilarious of ways. In the first episode, Tweedle-E and Tweedle-C venture a spelling bee challenge. Emily stymies Curtis with the term “horrogenous,” which, in her estimation, is a word (a noun, it seems) that refers to plants, like horticulture, except it’s not. Needless to say, all the fun doesn’t just take place in the kitchen on this show.

At the premiere I had a chance to talk with Chef Beck, who is just as warm and lovely as she appears on television (and, to note, just as pink as well!). She spoke to me about the challenges facing women in the culinary world—the name calling, the exclusion, and the pervasive sexual harassment—and her dream of “total world culinary domination.” To achieve this goal, she says, she needs to know the “dirty food secrets” of everyone around the world. Knowing these secrets—her dirty secret is mall pizza, by the way—will enable her to create the most naughty, most delicious, of dishes to over indulge the palate.

“Naughty” foods, clearly, are foods made of creams, butter, and bacon that are not touted as “healthy.” Decadent foods are naughty; fatty foods are naughty; sugary foods are, alas, naughty. This we all know, but Chef Beck implores us to indulge, just a little, and it is this encouragement to indulge through the creation of some sinful dishes (see her fried chicken dishes, particularly) that makes Chef Beck just as naughty as her food.

In the first episode, we hear the Dallas Morning News patronize Chef Beck’s naughtiness as “schtick,” but in their critique, they fail to understand Chef Beck’s culinary creations in their totality. In other words, they look solely at the end product—the plate of fried chicken—and say, “How naughty?” What they overlook is what we, the viewers, are able to see played out on the show: naughty is a lifestyle. It’s a continuous process that encompasses every step in the act of creation of food and of life. It’s not just the end product.

Chef Beck was gracious to partake in a quick game of word association. I asked her to shout out the first word that came to her mind. Here is the game, as it played out:

Me: Tuesday

Chef Beck: Hangover

Me: Pink

Chef Beck: Me

Me: Naughty

Chef Beck: Kitchen

Me: Fried

Chef Beck: Avocado

Me: Women

Chef Beck: Powerful

The Naughty Kitchen airs Tuesday nights at 10pm EST on Oxygen starting tonight!

Written by: Marcie Bianco, September 22nd 2009