Starting at a young age, as many as 80 percent of women around the world face at least occasional unwanted, harassing attention in public places from men they do not know; some women face it daily.

The harassment ranges from physically harmless leers, whistles, honks, kissing noises, and non-sexually explicit evaluative comments, 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 murder.

Street harassment and the underlying fear of it escalating into something worse makes most women feel unwelcome and unsafe in public at least sometimes, especially when they are alone. It causes women to restrict their time in public alone and to be on guard while there, limiting their access to resources and leadership opportunities. It also reminds them that they live in a society in which, because they are female, men are allowed to interrupt and bother them at any time in annoying, disrespectful, creepy, and threatening ways, virtually without any consequences.

While public harassment motivated by racism, homophobia, transphobia, or classism—types of deplorable harassment which men can be the target of and sometimes women perpetrate—is recognized as socially unacceptable behavior, men’s harassment of women motivated by gender and sexism is not. Instead it is portrayed as complimentary or “only” a trivial annoyance.

In reality, like other forms of harassment, street harassment is bullying behavior motivated by power and disrespect, and, its negative impact on women can be as extreme as causing them to move neighborhoods, change jobs because of harassers along the commute, and stay home more often than they would otherwise.

No country to date has achieved gender equality, and until street harassment is recognized as a serious problem and people work to end it, no country ever will.

[Feb. 2010: I'm slowly working on updating all of my content and working on a new layout to better share new resources and research I have from writing a book on street harassment (out in Aug. 2010). Please check back often for updates.]