Would I have called out my male friends for sexually harassing girls? It’s easy to say yes now
The first time my younger sister was sexually harassed by an older man, she was just 11. It was devastating to hear about, but even worse to know that I, as her brother, was powerless to prevent it happening again.
Growing up, I heard friends’ stories of the public sexual harassment they faced, often in school uniform. They were being followed, touched and shouted at, all for having dared to walk down a street.
These incidents were shocking, but I consoled myself with the thought that they were likely isolated cases, perpetrated by a few bad apples.
Such things never seemed to happen to them when I, or my male friends, were around. Of course, this wasn’t a coincidence: harassers tend to respect the presence of another man when choosing their targets. But at the time, it made it hard to understand the scale of the issue.
It wasn’t until my sisters, Maya and Gemma Tutton, founded the Our Streets Now campaign to end public sexual harassment, receiving hundreds of testimonies from girls across the country as young as eight, that I began to realise the scale of the problem.
As it turned out, the stories I heard were not isolated incidents.
Data released last month by the Office for National Statistics confirms how widespread public sexual harassment really is, with two-thirds of young women having been harassed in the past year. Yet many of these cases are completely legal.
Currently, if a 14-year-old girl is approached and sexually propositioned by a 50-year-old man making comments about her genitalia, she is not protected by existing laws. That cannot be right.
And now, six months on from the disappearance and murder of Sarah Everard, a new survey by Grazia has found that almost half of women feel less safe than they did in March.
That’s why I believe that public sexual harassment must be made illegal. These behaviours are so deeply entrenched in our society that it will take a comprehensive legal framework to signal that they will no longer be tolerated.
Encouragingly, this is something that has support not only from women and girls but from young men, too. New survey data from Plan International UK has found that an overwhelming majority of boys aged 14-21 (93 per cent) believe that harassment behaviours should be illegal.
The Government’s recent commitment to reviewing existing legislation is an important first step in this regard, but it must be followed with concrete action – and quickly.
Legislation alone, however, is not enough. Education is absolutely central to ending public sexual harassment, which is why Our Streets Now has been campaigning to include the issue in the national curriculum.
My school in East Sussex offered daily assemblies on countless subjects (and of varying interest), but no attention was ever paid to the harassment that my female friends faced.
Given this lack of legislation and education, it’s no surprise that some boys end up becoming perpetrators themselves. Plan International UK’s research has found that over half of boys (54 per cent) aged 14-21 in the UK say that they have witnessed their male friends engage in harassment, with 20 per cent admitting to feeling pressured to do so themselves
I was fortunate: my friends didn’t harass girls in public. But would I have called out my peers for engaging in behaviour that is not yet recognised as illegal, and is routinely belittled in our society? It’s easy to say yes in hindsight as a 23-year-old man, but young men should not be forced into a choice between becoming perpetrators or risking social isolation.
The clear conclusion from this data is that from a young age boys are socialised into considering such behaviour normal, having been raised in a country where public sexual harassment is tolerated, if not actively encouraged. This must change, for their own sake as well as that of women, girls and marginalised genders.
Yet boys are also part of the solution. Not only do they overwhelmingly believe sexual harassment behaviours should be a crime, but they also want to help.
Over half (58 per cent) feel confident they would know how to help if they saw someone being harassed in public. But we need to make it clearer where the law stands, and that’s why Our Streets Now and Plan International UK are campaigning for public sexual harassment to be made illegal through their Crime Not Compliment campaign.
It’s time for the Government to act, before another generation of children grows up – like mine – in the shadow of public sexual harassment.
