Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women 1st Edition

Kearl's scholarly book is written with articulate ease. She has the gift of writing about weighty subjects in a straightforward and engaging manner, that will hook the professional, the student, and the young teenager who is either the potential victim of or potential perpetrator of street harassment. My 21 year old nephew picked up the book to read and within a minute was totally engaged, oblivious to the chaos around him in my house full of guests, he just read and read.Kearl gives a voice to those of us who have come to accept cat calls, groping and unwanted male advances as just a part of life we have to put up with. This book will empower victims of street harassment by giving them practical, safe suggestions and solutions. It will also help those of us who have been frightened on the streets, the subway, in parks, or at the mall, feel less alone. Kearl has given a voice for all of us, with the countless stories she has gathered from women around the world. As a young adult fiction author who works with teenagers across the country, I can highly recommend this book for any teenager in your life, as well as women and men of every age. a great empowering read!

The other reviewers have brought up many of Kearl's best qualities as a writer and as a practical tactician for the inequalities of public places.I'd like to add a sentiment of my own and to point out a virtue of Kearl's too often neglected: As well as a fine and inspiring writer, Holly Kearl is one of those individuals who provides readers with new thoughts about and plans for how to live our everyday lives, and this is so whether we are women or men. She does something more and much rarer. She is a model analyst of and theoretician about everyday life and about gender relations.Kearl's work should be read by those who think about theories of how we experience the social world, as well as by those who wish an invitation for how to change the social world.Carol Gardner

I bought this book looking for tools to keep safe. I work as a public high school substitute teacher and the harassment, violence, sexual harassment, and cursing is rampant. A vice-principal suggested I ignore the constant stream of cursing by some students "if it wasn't directed at me!" This book is empowering. It validates the feeling of female ghettoization. This book is pricey and worth every cent. I found the tools I was looking for. Thank you to Holly Kearl!

Street harassment is rampant in all parts of the world--from New York City to Tokyo to Cairo--yet it is still accepted globally. This largely ignored problem is thoroughly discussed and analyzed in Holly Kearl's book entitled, Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women. Defined by Kearl in the first chapter as "unwanted attention" in public places, street harassment includes and is not limited to "physically harmless leers, whistles, honks, kissing noises, and nonsexually explicit evaluative comments," but also extends to "more insulting and threatening behavior like vulgar gestures, sexually charged comments, flashing, and stalking, to illegal actions like public masturbation, sexual touching, assault, and rape." Many (if not most) women experience it; very few men know about it.The second chapter explains the context in which street harassment occurs. If a young girl, perhaps wearing a short skirt, walks alone on a street at night and is sexually assaulted, she would most likely be blamed for the assault, right? Wrong, Kearl tells us; her clothing and time she chose to walk outside is not her fault that she was sexually assaulted. As someone who lived in a small town in Morocco for half a year, I can attest that I wore conservative clothes yet still experienced men whistling and throwing rocks at me in the light of the day. Therefore, Kearl explains, street harassment is a power dynamic that shows which gender wields more power and control in a given society.Yet street harassment is not just a gendered issue; it is multi-layered with race, socioeconomic status, gender expression, and disability, as Kearl writes in the third chapter. It is "a global problem," as the title of the fourth chapter states. It not only happens in cities, it is more likely to happen wherever women are alone and/or traveling in public by taxi, public transportation, and on foot.More than Kearl's analysis and extensive research about the topic, the quotations that she includes throughout the book helps the reader to understand why street harassment is a big problem. These quotations are from Kearl's surveys of people (the majority women) who experienced sexual harassment in public places. You can read more information about her surveys online. These written experiences illuminate women's views and thoughts about harassment which Kearl explains in the fifth chapter that can vary from woman to woman.Women view street harassment differently and therefore they deal with street harassment differently. Kearl notes in the sixth chapter that some women choose to ignore it; others choose to directly address the harasser. A missing link in solving the street harassment issue, as explained in the seventh chapter, is to include male allies by educating and engaging them that street harassment is not okay. Equally important in combating this problem is empowering women and raising public awareness, which Kearl gives specific ideas and suggestions as to how to do this in the eighth and ninth chapters respectively. Finally, in the tenth chapter, Kearl notes that we must make street harassment an issue. If we shrug it to the side and ignore it, we are making a statement that street harassment is okay.I suggest that everyone--women and especially men (because street harassment needs male allies)--pick up a copy of Kearl's book to understand the complexities of street harassment and why it should not be ignored any longer. More importantly, though, after reading Stop Street Harassment, think about what you can do to stop street harassment in your own community. Because street harassment is not going to go away--and the time to take action is now!

Holly Kearl delves into the complexities of street harassment - the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and other aspects of identity that shape our experiences. This book is informative, insightful, moving and well-researched. We need to bring this book into classrooms, community centers, libraries and homes -- we need to read it with our youth, our parents, our partners. It is a powerful tool for activists, educators and anyone concerned about making our streets safer.

This is the must-have-book if you are researching about street harassment and sexual harassment. The literature on the issue has advanced, of course, but this still is one of the first complete compilations about the theme.