Using groundbreaking studies, news stories, and interviews, this book underscores that there will never be gender equity until men stop harassing women in public spaces—and it details strategies for achieving this goal. Street harassment is generally dismissed as harmless, but in reality, it causes women to feel unsafe in public, at least sometimes. To achieve true gender equality, it must come to an end. Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women draws on academic studies, informal surveys, news articles, and interviews with activists to explore the practice's definition and prevalence, the societal contexts in which it occurs, and the role of factors such as race and sexual orientation. Perhaps more crucially, the book makes clear how women experience street harassment—how they feel about and respond to it—and the ways it negatively impacts lives. But understanding is only a beginning. In the second half of the book, readers will find concrete strategies for dealing with street harassers and ways to become involved in working to end this all-too-common violation. Educators, counselors, parents, and other concerned individuals will discover resources for teaching about harassment and modeling behavior that will help prevent harassment incidents.

Once a largely dismissed problem, street harassment is now headline news and being addressed by many international agencies and governments worldwide. This book details how a growing number of individuals, small groups, international organizations, and government agencies worldwide are working to create safe public spaces. Everyone should be able to navigate through public spaces without facing harassment or the threat of sexual assault, yet that is a right that millions of people worldwide are routinely denied. In the United States alone, 65 percent of women and 25 percent of men experience street harassment. This book taps personal stories, research data, news stories, and information about global campaigns and grassroots action in dozens of countries to trace the growing social movement to recognize, address, and prevent street harassment. The author suggests what steps need to be taken next to help stop street harassment globally and invites readers to take action and be part of the solution. The book addresses specific and prominent incidents of street harassment such as the mass sexual assaults of women at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt; the gang rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, India, in 2012; and the viral hidden-camera video produced by Hollaback!, an advocacy group dedicated to ending street harassment, that documents the catcalling and stalking that happens to a woman as she walks through New York City. It documents the explosion of studies, personal story sharing, grassroots campaigns, and media attention on street harassment since 2010 as well as Global Safe Cities efforts by international organizations like UN Women and ActionAid in countries on all six continents during that time period. Attention is also paid to the ongoing lack of enforcement of laws on street harassment by police and judges. The book concludes by looking forward at remedies for the problem: education among youth about street harassment and addressing issues of consent and respect.

The debut book from a celebrated artist on the urgent topic of street harassment Every day, all over the world, women are catcalled and denigrated simply for walking down the street. Boys will be boys, women have been told for generations, ignore it, shrug it off, take it as a compliment. But the harassment has real consequences for women: in the fear it instills and the shame they are made to feel. In Stop Telling Women to Smile, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh uses her arresting street art portraits to explore how women experience hostility in communities that are supposed to be homes. She addresses the pervasiveness of street harassment, its effects, and the kinds of activism that can serve to counter it. The result is a cathartic reckoning with the aggression women endure, and an examination of what equality truly entails.

Back Off is filled with real-life success stories from women who have stopped harassers cold: -- Sharon, who succeeded in stopping a whole crew of habitual harassers in a city park... -- Stephanie, a ten-year-old who confronted and escaped a child molester... -- Catharine and Molly, who stood up to their landlord and stopped him from harassing the tenants... and dozens more. From an eight-year-old who successfully challenged two young harassers on the playground to an organized group of fifty women who confronted a dockworker in response to an attempted rape on the job, here's what they did, how they did it -- and how you can do it, too. Back Off is the first book to focus on the direct-action tactics that work and the first to deal with harassment everywhere it takes place, in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs, at school, on the street, on the bus or subway, in the park, even in church. Back Off examines the dynamics of sex and power in sexual harassment, the motives behind harassers' actions, and why traditional responses such as appeasement or aggression don't work, and describes the successful resistance strategies that you really can use -- including nonviolent personal confrontation techniques, group confrontations, administrative remedies, and formal lawsuits.

Once a largely dismissed problem, street harassment is now headline news and being addressed by many international agencies and governments worldwide. This book details how a growing number of individuals, small groups, international organizations, and government agencies worldwide are working to create safe public spaces. Everyone should be able to navigate through public spaces without facing harassment or the threat of sexual assault, yet that is a right that millions of people worldwide are routinely denied. In the United States alone, 65 percent of women and 25 percent of men experience street harassment. This book taps personal stories, research data, news stories, and information about global campaigns and grassroots action in dozens of countries to trace the growing social movement to recognize, address, and prevent street harassment. The author suggests what steps need to be taken next to help stop street harassment globally and invites readers to take action and be part of the solution. The book addresses specific and prominent incidents of street harassment such as the mass sexual assaults of women at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt; the gang rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, India, in 2012; and the viral hidden-camera video produced by Hollaback!, an advocacy group dedicated to ending street harassment, that documents the catcalling and stalking that happens to a woman as she walks through New York City. It documents the explosion of studies, personal story sharing, grassroots campaigns, and media attention on street harassment since 2010 as well as Global Safe Cities efforts by international organizations like UN Women and ActionAid in countries on all six continents during that time period. Attention is also paid to the ongoing lack of enforcement of laws on street harassment by police and judges. The book concludes by looking forward at remedies for the problem: education among youth about street harassment and addressing issues of consent and respect.

At every stage of education, sexual harassment is common, and often considered a rite of passage for young people. It’s not unusual for a girl to hear “Hey, Shorty!” on a daily basis, as she walks down the hall or comes into the school yard, followed by a sexual innuendo, insult, come-on, or assault. But when teenagers are asked whether they experience this in their own lives, most of them say it’s not happening. Girls for Gender Equity, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, has developed a model for teens to teach one another about sexual harassment. How do you define it? How does it affect your self-esteem? What do you do in response? Why is it so normalized in schools, and how can we as a society begin to address these causes? Geared toward students, parents, teachers, policy makers, and activists, this book is an excellent model for building awareness and creating change in any community.

Over the last few decades, research, activity, and funding has been devoted to improving the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine. In recent years the diversity of those participating in these fields, particularly the participation of women, has improved and there are significantly more women entering careers and studying science, engineering, and medicine than ever before. However, as women increasingly enter these fields they face biases and barriers and it is not surprising that sexual harassment is one of these barriers. Over thirty years the incidence of sexual harassment in different industries has held steady, yet now more women are in the workforce and in academia, and in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine (as students and faculty) and so more women are experiencing sexual harassment as they work and learn. Over the last several years, revelations of the sexual harassment experienced by women in the workplace and in academic settings have raised urgent questions about the specific impact of this discriminatory behavior on women and the extent to which it is limiting their careers. Sexual Harassment of Women explores the influence of sexual harassment in academia on the career advancement of women in the scientific, technical, and medical workforce. This report reviews the research on the extent to which women in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine are victimized by sexual harassment and examines the existing information on the extent to which sexual harassment in academia negatively impacts the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women pursuing scientific, engineering, technical, and medical careers. It also identifies and analyzes the policies, strategies and practices that have been the most successful in preventing and addressing sexual harassment in these settings.