Queer In Public: We Need To Talk About Street Harassment
By: Erin Hampson, They Them
Tags: Street Harassment, Queer, Feminism, LGBTQ, Sexism

This is not an uncommon experience among queer people and this is not a sustainable or acceptable solution.

In fact, it doesn’t help to conceptualise coping strategies as solutions at all; they merely hold one’s head above water, while simultaneously acting to further separate and isolate queer individuals from public spaces.

The only reason that this avoidant smoke screen of denial has been lifted from me is because of my recent experience as the target of an incessant harasser, who repeatedly approached me, becoming increasingly more threatening and aggressive. This has been an escalating situation, over the past six weeks, that I have reported to the police and even relocated city in order to avoid further encounters with this man.

“He wanted me to be afraid”

The first time he approached me he was just another street harasser, just another instance of verbal sexual harassment. The only reason I found it significant enough to mention to somebody was because of the unprecedented length of time he managed the illusion that describing his aggressive sexual desires at me would coax me into bed with him. There was such a sense of entitlement in him, to my time, my body. I had forgotten all about him by the next time I saw him, a month later.

It seemed that my previous rejection and threat of involving the police had left him angry.

His later approaches turned to aggressive intimidation, in attempts to re-assert his sense of dominance and power. He wanted me to be afraid and think that he was above consequence. Even after his third approach, when the police were called to remove him from my vicinity, he persisted to harass me further. Each time I was left increasingly shaken, afraid, and unable to let it just wash over me, like all those times before.

The repeated offences of this man somehow gave his actions a value that I had not given to the countless instances of previous harassment. This was just a more extreme and unavoidable form of the limits that my constant harassment was already putting of my freedoms and sense of safety within public spaces. It was incapacitating.

“This is an exhausting way to live.”

My sense of control was shattered. I began struggling to gather the mental resources to leave the house. Then, when I did, I was full of stress, anxiety, fear and irrational hostility towards others on the street. I avoided many parts of the city because they felt too unsafe. I was questioning all of my decisions, with potential dangers and ways to feel safe being my top priority. This is an exhausting way to live. Fear can infest your thoughts and become quite consuming. Staying in bed often seemed like the only way to feel safe and, since I was under no obligation to go into work under the circumstances, that is what I did.

To go back and consider the question I asked at the start: ‘Have you ever lived in a place where you did not feel safe?’. The eventual conclusion, in the case of individually targeted street harassment on the basis of non-conforming presentation, is that one’s own body becomes the place that feels unsafe, and this reality is so very damaging, life-limiting and shameful.