Complimented to Concerned

It’s Not A Compliment grew out of our desire to do something about how pervasive and normalised street harassment is in our society. We know that it’s something a lot of people – especially women– will experience at some point in their lives.” Aakanksha Manjunath, Co-founder and Campaign Director at It’s Not a Compliment explains.

Street harassment refers to any unwanted verbal or non-verbal behaviour directed at an individual by a stranger in a public space. This can include acts such as unwanted comments, whistling, leering, persistent requests for someone’s name or other personal information after they’ve said no along with more physical acts of violence such as groping and sexual assault.

Harassment is about power and control and most often reflects broader forms of societal discrimination – not only in terms of sexism but also racism, homophobia, ableism or Islamophobia. The intersectionality of identities means that women from racial and ethnic minority groups or members of the LGBTQIA+ community are often more vulnerable to street harassment.

“The reason my team and I chose to start ‘It’s Not A Compliment’ (INAC) is because while we’re all out there trying to solve climate change, poverty, inequality and religious conflicts to name a few, issues such as street harassment have been overlooked. While there is a considerable difference in terms of the complexities of the issues, street harassment affects or has affected millions of people worldwide, particularly women and people from the LGBTQI communities,” Aakanksha continues. 

Annelise Lecordier, Co-founder and Head of Communications at and Policy at INAC, says that, “Our campaign aims to be as inclusive as possible. We believe in the importance of creating safe public spaces for all and acknowledge that people from a variety of backgrounds can be victims of street harassment – even men.

While this is not something that is often reported or talked about, we know that men can also be victims of street harassment, especially if they are members of the LGBTQIA+ community or do not publicly present in traditionally masculine ways. Our goal is to ensure that everyone is treated with respect and dignity when navigating public spaces, regardless of their background.”

In Australia, there is no specific law against street harassment. Instead, each state has criminal law legislation that considers certain behaviours illegal and imposes corresponding penalties. These laws govern incidents like someone using threatening language, groping, indecent assault, public masturbation and public exposure.

It has recently become popular for countries around the world to introduce specific legislation to tackle street harassment. It’s an approach that has been favoured in places like Belgium, Portugal, France and the Philippines.

These laws typically try to criminalise street harassment by imposing a fine or, in certain cases, jail sentences of up to a year depending on the severity of the harassment. While the introduction of legislation that encourage reporting and a criminal justice response to street harassment holds a great symbolic value, they are not, however, entirely unproblematic. 

The barriers to achieving justice through these types of laws are often very high with difficulties surrounding reporting, collecting evidence and the lengthy nature of the process resulting in these laws being rarely used in practice. There is also the additional barrier of police officers being the ones who can actually take the initiative to pursue the charge further. In many cases, the police are reluctant to spend limited resources on such charges with the values of individual officers playing a huge role in how harmful these incidents are deemed to be. 

“Over time, street harassment has become normalised to a significant extent. Victims either don’t want to share their experiences out of shame, lack of accessible resources, or the difficulty of holding perpetrators to account, as seen in a lot of stories that have come out of the #MeToo movement,” Aakanksha says.

As these types of laws gain in popularity globally with many movements calling for similar legislation to be implemented in their countries, It's Not A Compliment believes that it is timely to more critically consider their possible impacts on society as a whole. Looking at France’s new mechanism of on-the-spot fines, for example, highlights the potential pitfalls of a criminalising approach. 

“France’s system aims to expedite proceedings by reducing the amount of evidence required. Instead, discretion is left to police officers to determine if street harassment has occurred and impose a penalty accordingly.  For many communities who have strained relationships with law enforcement agencies, there is always a concern that the police will target and take disproportionate action against them. That’s something we’ve been very conscious of as we advocate for more policy action on street harassment,” Annelise explains.

“For us, there can be no advancement on this issue that comes at the expense of already marginalised communities - particularly when you consider the fact that it is these very communities that are often most vulnerable to harassment.

This is why we favour a community-led approach that focuses on education and culture change rather than criminalisation. The only way to truly tackle this issue is to create a broader social and cultural shift around the way we talk about street harassment and what behaviours and norms we view as being acceptable in public spaces.

The work that we’re doing on our social media channels is key to that. By sharing the stories of street harassment submitted to us by the community and collaborating with artists who bring their own unique perspectives on this issue, our goal is to normalise talking about these incidents, increase awareness of the issue and start a broader conversation around what we as a society view as acceptable behaviour.

We’re also working on compiling a list of resources that people can draw from to learn more about their rights in these situations, find out more about the services available to them and just more generally know that there is a community out there that they can draw from that understands and takes their experiences seriously.”

These incidents can have huge negative impacts on a person’s mental health as they end up internalising feelings of shame, guilt, frustration and helplessness as a result of constant objectification. It can make people feel deeply unsafe in public spaces and force them to alter their behaviour to avoid these experiences, in turn limiting the extent to which they are able to exist freely in our towns and cities.

“We believe that street harassment should be something that is more widely recognised as a form of harm in itself – not simply as a precursor to other forms of violence. We are way past the point of simply telling people to dress differently or to just not go out at night. It’s time for concrete action from our government and for the narrative around these incidents to finally change,” Annelise explains. 

“We can all take small steps by speaking out, and speaking with young men and women to shape the world we want to live in,” says Aakanksha. 

To get involved with INAC you can share your own experiences or instances of witnessing street harassment - the more people that share their stories, the more likely it will be to create sustainable change.

PLANS TO COME

We have a lot of things in the pipeline! We’re in the midst of preparing for International Anti-Street Harassment Week in April. Between the 19th and 23rd of April we’ll be hosting Melbourne’s first ever series of events for the week focused on increasing awareness on the issue and continuing the important conversations we’ve been having on our social media channels in person.

We also launched our website on the 14th of February. People can go there to find out more about this issue, available resources and and a blog where academics, artists, NGOs and people who have experienced street harassment can share their unique perspectives on the issue. It’ll be a place where we’ll have the opportunity to explore particular aspects of street harassment in more depth than we currently can on our social media channels. We’ve also been busy reaching out to politicians to advocate for a policy model that we think would be best suited to addressing the issue.

Lastly, we’re also in the process of collaborating with local magazines and radio channels, so that our message can reach more people - not just those who’ve faced street harassment but also those who perpetrate or are silent bystanders to it.

Ultimately, our goal is to change attitudes. Facts and figures on street harassment have existed for years but have not been able to change attitudes which is everything we do is focused on an education, awareness and cultural change. 

Follow https://www.facebook.com/itsnotacompliment/ to find out more.

WORDS: AAKANKSHA MANJUNATH AND ANNELISE LECORDIER
PHOTOGRAPHY: IT'S NOT A COMPLIMENT