In honor of Sexual Violence Awareness Month, we want to spotlight activists who are working to end gender based public sexual harassment. Every Friday in April, we will introduce you to their work, their motivation for bringing attention to this form of sexual harassment, and what we should do if we are victims of or bystanders to street harassment.
Credit to Holly Kearl
First up is Holly Kearl. We were introduced to Holly through her survey link she posted on Feministing and sent around through Holla Back NYC. We are delighted that she is a DC metro gal, with a deep interest in women’s rights work and a huge Holla Back DC! supporter.
One hundred and forty characters or less bio of you.
At work in DC, through volunteering, and in my spare time, I’m an activist for women’s rights. In 2007, I wrote my master’s thesis at GWU on street harassment.
What motivated you to start a blog on street harassment?
In 2008, because of my graduate school research on street harassment, a reporter interviewed me for a CNN.com article about catcalling. The article prompted lots of CNN comments, blog posts, and random people e-mailing me. Around this time I revisited some of the websites I had studied for my paper and I found that UK anti-street harassment and several HollaBacks were gone and the link to stories on the Street Harassment Project was inactive. The combination of seeing how many people were talking about street harassment and realizing there were fewer online outlets for discussing it led me to start my own street harassment blog and website.
Tell us about your book.
Right now, my book proposal is sitting on desks at various publishing firms and, because I work full time, my overall book writing is going slowly – but steadily. I’m trying to make people’s stories the driving point throughout the book because they are so compelling and what the general public should read to understand the problem. The first half of the book explores why street harassment is problematic on a societal level and at an individual level for so many women, and the second half provide readers with both tactics for challenging harassers and long-term strategies for making public places safe and welcoming for women.
How did you collect the stories?
I created an online survey through Survey Monkey.
How many responses did you receive?
In one month’s time, I received over 1,400 responses.
Wow! Did you know that you would receive so many respondents?
No, not at all. In 2007 when I conducted a simple survey for my thesis, it took me nearly three months to get 225 responses.
I am still ecstatic to have so much data and I think it really speaks to how many people feel strongly about this issue.
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