Making street harassment a hate crime could unfairly target minorities, warns advocate
'Conversations around street harassment turn racist really fast,' says Julie Lalonde
A viral video of a man slapping a woman in Paris has renewed discussions about street harassment, including whether legislation or even making it a hate crime can help to curb it.
But while anti-harassment laws have had some success around the world, one advocate cautions that they could also have unintended negative consequences.
"Conversations around street harassment turn racist really fast," said Julie Lalonde, the director of Hollaback Ottawa, part of a global movement to address the issue.
"The perception is that it is men of colour, immigrant men, street-involved men, men from poor neighbourhoods who engage in street harassment," she told The Current's guest host Megan Williams.
Most forms of harassment — following or grabbing someone in public — are already a crime in Canada, she said.
But she worries that creating new legislation would result in "higher levels of policing of certain neighbourhoods."
In Ottawa, she added, "you're as likely to be street harassed walking through campus, walking by Parliament Hill, as you are in a neighbourhood that is deemed a poor neighborhood."
Last week in Paris, a man slapped a woman who told him to stop harassing her. She uploaded CCTV footage of the incident to YouTube, where it has been watched more than five million times. It caused uproar in France, which already has plans to introduce on-the-spot fines for harassment, due to take effect this fall.
President Emmanuel Macron said the aim is to ensure "women are not afraid to be outside."
In the U.K., the city of Nottingham has already experimented with making street harassment a hate crime.
"I think women experience these sorts of things every day around the world, and it's become normal," said Helen Voce, CEO at Nottingham Women's Centre.
Voce was part of the campaign for police to consider misogynistic street harassment a hate crime — in the same vein as racially or religiously motivated public attacks.
"We're not going to accept it anymore," she said.
Finding support among senior officers and the general public, campaigners helped to train police in how to handle the incidents. They also publicized the project so women knew they had way to complain. Close to 200 complaints have been made in just over two years.
The project allowed women to ask aggressive men if they knew they were committing a hate crime, Voce said, and gave them "more confidence to be able to challenge things when they feel comfortable to do so."
The aim was never to secure a high number of prosecutions, she said, adding that "women just wanted it to stop."
Women aren't 'yelling at men'
Lalonde wants the conversation to be less about how women individually respond, and more about why men feel it's OK to harass them.
"It is a very gendered phenomenon," she said. "Women are not standing around on street corners yelling at men when they walk by."
"Why is it that men are more likely to do it when they are in groups, than when they are alone?
"And why do we keep believing that I'm supposed to be flattered?"
Listen to the full conversation near the top of this post.
Written by Padraig Moran, with files from CBC News. This segment was produced by The Current's Danielle Carr and Jessica Linzey.