Fierce Brighton Women Fight Against Street Harassment: Introducing the Anti-Harassment Club

After months of being stuck inside, cities across the UK rejoiced when lockdown finally started to lift. The warm weather lured people all over, as they flocked to beaches and parks to swim and sunbathe. The excitement was tangible, and everyone was thrilled to finally be able to catch some sun rays and do a bit more than just that daily exercise. 

But as people started to go out more once the lockdown this summer ended, so began a rise in harassment. And here we introduce a fighting force against it - the Anti-Harassment Club, formed by five amazing Brighton women advocating to make street harassment punishable by law. 

Brighton Girl and other social media groups were filled with daily reminders of this horrible downside of our lovely cities. Unwanted stares, touching, picture taking, wolf whistling and other verbal attacks, you name it and we have heard or experienced it all. And we are done!

Five amazing Brighton Girls decided to take action. In just a few weeks Emma Wilson, Chloe Payne and Helen Brown had founded the incredible Anti-Harassment Club. City Girl got together with one of the founders, Emma Wilson, to discuss the newly founded club and its mission.

“What to a man might be just a wolf whistle or a beep of a horn, to women that is a reminder of every time she has been harassed on the street trying to go about her day to day business,” Emma says. In order to document what was happening, and to bring tangible material forward, one of the founders, Chloe Payne, started to collect a database about these cases.

“It is painfully clear that someone needed to tackle this problem. Not just on a local level, but on a national level,” Emma continues.

 The Anti-Harassment Club. Photography by Lesley Burdett.

Anti-Harassment Club’s aim is not only to bring awareness about the issue, but to make changes to the society on all levels by criminalising gender-based street harassment.

“We do have a parliamentary petition under review, and we do want to make it legally recognised as a violation of human rights,” Emma explains some of their core values. “When you are just walking to the shop or reading a book on the beach, or going to a job, we should not be forced to see ourselves as merely a sexual object and that is a problem.”

And the club has definitely kept busy -- they have already had talks with Sussex police and have a meeting set up with a local Labour councillor to bring the issue forward. Not only that, but they have also been featured in BBC News as well as the front page of The Argus.

Emma explains that their aim is to keep an open dialogue with change-makers and other community organisations. They not only want to highlight issues of street harassment, but to see what, if anything, has been done to tackle the problem so far. And, of course, to criminalise gender-based street harassment in the whole country by supporting the Misogyny as a Hate Crime bill in the UK.

Locally, the Anti-Harassment Club “aim to help local women by encouraging bystander intervention by offering workshops to teach safe protocol and guidance for witnesses of gender-based street harassment, by rolling out volunteer safety patrols and meeting points in 'harassment hotspots' identified from their database and by educating and raising public awareness around street harassment and the negative impact it has on our local community and wider society,” Emma says.

You can access all of this information, check out Anti-Harassment Club on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or go to antiharassment.club for updates and guidance. 

Please do remember to report any instances of gender-based harassment or inappropriate behaviour to the police if you are comfortable doing so. The more cases are reported, the harder the issue is to ignore. You can also report the incident to the Anti-Harassment Club anonymously through their website, where it will be added to the database. 

Understandably, it is not always possible or comfortable to do so, in which case Anti-Harassment Club has plenty of resources on how to deal with the trauma, and the club is always there to offer support and make our streets safer for everyone. 

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Written by Saara-Maria Salonen