D.C.’s fight against street harassment

“A common misconception about street harassment, especially among the educated, is it’s a cultural thing,” May says. But based on the locations of the incidents that are reported on the site, “we see it evenly across race and across economic background.”

May and a group of friends started Hollaback in 2005. Today, more than two dozen sister sites exist, most of them formed in the last year, and a dozen more are expected to launch by the end of the summer. Now, May says, the fight against street harassment is reaching far beyond computer screens. In Israel, Hollaback activists are pushing the government to add streetlights for safety. In Kabul women participated in a march against harassment, carrying signs such as one that read “This street also belongs to me.” In dozens of cities, crowds have gathered for SlutWalks, in which women, some in purposefully revealing outfits, march together as a statement about a woman’s right to wear whatever she wants without being victimized.

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“This is the beginning,” May says. “If I went to the White House tomorrow and said we need a public service announcement on street harassment, they would say, ‘Street what?’ But if I go in a couple years,” when there are more sites and more data, she says, “it’s going to be a very different response.”

But a movement’s momentum is not just determined by its supporters. It is also fueled by its opposition — of which the anti-street harassment effort has plenty. Nestled among the sympathetic comments that follow the Court House Metro story is this one: “Oh, c’mon, lighten up — why so uptight about a guy taking a pic of your panties? Upskirting is practically a national sport in Japan.”

Lynberg and Shenoy have 200 comments that they have saved but never published because of their contents. Among them are racist rants and profanity-punctuated insults.

“You’re lucky,” one reads, “your ass was all he slapped.”

Shenoy and Lynberg say they initially didn’t publicize their last names for fear of the backlash. They had seen the eye-rolling the topic could induce — even among friends — and feared worse. They changed their minds only after requests began coming in for them to give public presentations on the subject. To date, they have given more than 50 throughout the Washington region. They have also conducted focus groups, gained nonprofit status and formed a board of directors.

The idea for the recent community audits came from Holly Kearl, who four years ago was a graduate student at George Washington University writing her master’s thesis on street harassment; now, she is one of nation’s top experts on the subject and runs Stop Street Harassment, an internationally read Web site and blog.

Kearl, 28, was at a conference in India last November when she learned that other cities had conducted safety audits. Immediately upon her return, she called Lynberg and Shenoy to see if they would partner with her to try it in the District. In February, they met to plan. The goal, Kearl wrote on her blog, was to use the findings to make recommendations to lawmakers that would ultimately lead to the first D.C. City Council hearing on street harassment.

In March, on a day Kearl declared “Anti-Street Harassment Day,” teams fanned out across the city with questionnaires that encouraged them not only to look for signs of harassment but also opportunities for someone to take it to a more violent level: ill-lighted nooks, deserted areas, the absence of a police presence. In May, the audit teams went out again, this time at night.

***

After leaving the young men the night of the audit, Langelan motions toward a bank machine tucked in a corner. “Did you see that dangerous ATM?” she says. A few blocks later, she stops in front of waist-high barrier separating the sidewalk from a building under construction. “If someone was attacking you, they could throw you over that wall.”

Across the city, more than 50 people are asking the same types of questions, looking with similar skepticism at nooks they might not otherwise notice.

Fast-forward three weeks to a meeting around a horseshoe-shaped table topped with Hershey miniatures and stapled sheets of papers. About a dozen people have shown up. Langelan sits at the table. Shenoy and Kearl stand at the front of the room. Lynberg conferences in by phone.

The question on all of their minds: What was learned from the audit?

The data are at best a rough sketch and reveal few surprises. The majority of participants reported seeing graffiti, trash on the ground and dark streetlamps. Most also reported that, day or night, they would feel safe waiting for a bus alone, would feel comfortable seeking help from someone at a store nearby and believe if they screamed for help, someone would hear them.

During the daytime audit, three people reported witnessing or experiencing harassment. At night, one person did.

The findings will be broken down further, Kearl tells the group, but even then it’s not enough to take to the City Council. The picture is incomplete. Volunteers did not come forward to survey Wards 7 and 8 and among the participants who showed up to canvass other areas, there wasn’t enough diversity — racially, economically or otherwise — to declare a representative effort.

Kearl is disappointed. But the positive side — one that is not lost on her, Shenoy or Lynberg — is that in just a few months they motivated dozens of people to analyze their city and to think about what would make them feel safer.

“You made it happen,” Shenoy tells everyone in the room. “I know the data we collected is not research-worthy ... but it starts adding numbers to something we’ve never had numbers on in D.C.”

At the table, hands go up, and suggestions are thrown out on how to improve the audit — everyone assumes there will be a next time.

What about using an iPhone app?

What about writing on maps since one block can differ greatly from the next?

What about having people keep personal logs?

Langelan supports the idea of logs.She says that when she has asked her classes to keep track of street harassment experiences, some people have recorded three incidents in a week and others 300.

She, like others in the room, appears undaunted by the audit results. Langelan, out of everyone, knows the challenges that come in trying to change the status quo. In her book, published in the early 1990s, Langelan wrote about an effort in the mid-1980s in Washington dubbed “The Hassle-Free Zone Campaign.” At that time, a group of women from a half-dozen community organizations came together with the goal of declaring the nation’s capital a harassment-free area. Posters were printed, the mayor passed a proclamation and speakouts were held in known hot spots.

“Did we succeed in ending street harassment once and for all in Washington, D.C.?” Langelan wrote in the book. “No. That might take a few more years.”

Or a few decades.

Before the meeting is over, Langelan offers another suggestion — one that is less ambitious than a city-wide audit but promises immediate results. She pulls out a stack of papers and starts passing them around the table.

It’s her flier.

Theresa Vargas is a Washington Post staff writer. She can be reached at vargast@washpost.com.