Can’t a Woman Even Walk Down the Street No More?

The recent footage titled, ‘10 hours of walking through New York City as a woman’, has gone viral and been replicated in different countries all over the World, exposing people to the eye opening truth about street harassment.

“Hey baby”, “DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN”, “You don’t wanna talk?”

These are but a few of the come-ons one woman in a regular pair of jeans and T-shirt received while walking through the streets of New York City. This social experiment, according to CNN, was conducted by an anti-harassment group where a woman, Shoshana B. Roberts, carried two microphones in her hand and had a hidden camera follow her.

Shoshana, according to the Metro UK, has a black belt in Taekwondo and volunteered for the social experiment to highlight the issue.

The video, posted on YouTube two weeks ago, shows the actress walking in silence around New York in trainers, jeans and a crew neck T-shirt, being verbally harassed as she walks through a variety of different neighborhoods. Some strangers offer flattery while others exclaim in sheer excitement and proceed to follow her.

The response to the video has been mixed with some people disregarding it as a non-serious issue while others argue that ignoring street harassment is choosing to be ‘willfully ignorant’. However, the video has since sparked a series of similar videos across the globe, exposing the harsh realities of harassment on the streets. Another video, ‘Ten hours of walking through Delhi’, shows a woman receiving similar cat calls albeit in a different language. Interestingly, a sister video was filmed in neighboring Mumbai with not a single recorded case of harassment towards a woman in a short skirt.

According a study conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as reported by the Irish Times, comparing the impact of a safe public transport system to a woman’s ability to successfully work or study. Out of 15 cities surveyed, Colombia’s capital, Bogota, ranked the worst. Women’s votes in Paris showed a clear mistrust in the public’s help and assistance, ranking it the second worst city in Europe. Moscow was voted with the worst public transport in Europe, attributed to women’s lack of confidence that authorities would actually investigate a crime. Other cities that ranked very low on the list included Jakarta, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Manila and Seoul.