You do have the power
US musician and activist Shawna Potter is on a mission to make spaces safer and empower the general public to challenge street harassment
Shawna Potter, founding member of US activist group Hollaback! Baltimore and singer in feminist hardcore punk band War On Women gets asked about sexual harassment a lot. She’s lost count of the number of people who have said to her “‘‘Oh, the punk scene’s so sexist’, or ‘hardcore’s so sexist’, ‘Harassment happens’ — blah, blah, blah”
As an activist who provides workshops to organisations and community groups seeking to make their spaces safer, she also gets to work with the general public in all their messy, contradictory glory. As such, she knows that sexual harassment and street harassment in a more general sense can happen anywhere “I’m like ‘It ain’t just hardcore, I hate to tell you, it’s kind’ve anywhere we go in public!’”
She believes that such behaviour needs to be challenged at source “The sooner that behaviour can be curbed, or corrected, the better. And frankly that takes more and more people saying ‘Hey, no, you can’t do that here’, The reason that kind of behaviour continues is that it’s given a pass. That it’s just ignored, at best, or approved of and no one cares, at worst.”
She’s not talking about calling out perpetrators on Twitter; she means real life action, in real time on a face to face basis.
If you type the phrases “safer spaces” and “bystander intervention” into Google it’s easy to see why Potter’s approach has yet to catch on. The kind of sites that come up in search results tend to be exclusively content from higher education websites or else local government. There’s the occasional anarchist federation or other hard left activist group website that pops up as well, but there’s certainly nothing mainstream, nothing readable or entry level.
Even the Wikipedia entry for bystander intervention discourages further investigation:
By confining the pragmatic, action focused practices of bystander intervention theory to post-secondary education establishments and small subcultural communities, the general public are being denied the tools they need to intervene when they witness an incident of street harassment.
Potter’s book, Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play, and Gather seeks to challenge this. The book aims to take the practices of bystander intervention theory and safer spaces out of educational establishments and small subcultural communities and make them mainstream.
It’s a small, very readable and reasonably priced tome which is divided into two sections: Your Space and Your Self. Your Space focuses on preventative work, such as what venues can do to create safer spaces and how to behave appropriately towards someone who has just been a victim of harassment. Readers are also introduced to the five D’s of bystander intervention. The section concludes with a chapter on accountability which includes how to apologise and learn from mistakes.
Your Self focuses more on personal behaviours (chapter one is helpfully titled ‘How to flirt without being a creep’) what to do if you yourself are a victim of harassment, and very inspiring real life examples of safer spaces and bystander intervention in action.
As Potter says, the tactics she outlines in her book are deliberately flexible because she wants to provide people with the tools to tackle street harassment not just in venues but also in much more public places “The street, the grocery store. Literally anywhere where people are present and harassment could happen, there’s gonna be a tactic in this book that you can use.”
Rather than encouraging witnesses to loudly and visibly rush in, possibly making a situation worse, Potter recommends ways in which witnesses to street harassment can assess the situation and decide which of the five strategies of bystander intervention are appropriate. If it feels safe to do so then a direct response might be the best option, but sometimes distraction techniques, delegation or a more delayed response might be more appropriate, as would be documenting the incident. What’s important is that the bystander doesn’t put themself in an unsafe situation but that they do support the person who is being harassed.
“A lot of people have good instincts” says Potter “and most people want to do the right thing” Intervening when you see someone being harassed can be a very daunting experience, and she understands why people might be reluctant to do so. “They’ve been scared into not acting, either by society’s standards of what is polite behaviour — ‘Hey, don’t bother people, that’s their business, that’s private’ — that kind of thing, or, again, there hasn’t been a guidebook to tell you ‘Just say this, just do this’.” Until now.
She uses a First Aid analogy “If I saw someone choking in front of me or having a heart attack, I might have some ideas about what to do, but without seeing the information ‘This is what you do if there’s a fire’, ‘This is what you do if someone’s choking’ — Without seeing that a bunch of times, in a bunch of different ways, or knowing that there’s a guide, a poster in every restaurant that tells you exactly what the steps are, I would feel uncomfortable.”
But if information outlining how to intervene safely and successfully in an incident of street harassment were available, more people might have the confidence and the will power to do so. As Potter acknowledges in her book; your first attempt might not go as well as you would hope it to, but that doesn’t mean that you should give up. Over time, you will gain confidence and you will improve. She also recognises that there are real rewards to be had by intervening, not just for the victim but for the bystander.
“Being able to support another person is really empowering.” she enthuses “When I am able to stick up for someone who’s experiencing transphobic harassment or racist harassment, when I’m able to support them in the way that the situation calls for, I actually feel powerful. I feel empowered. And it’s a nice thing to be reminded that I do have power, because every time I’m harassed, that gets taken away a little bit. So it’s like I’m re-filling my piggy bank of power, re-filling my glass, every time I can stand up for somebody else.”
Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play and Gather is published by AK Press and is available now.
