One More Thing About That Viral Street Harassment Video: Its Creators Don’t Want to Imprison Catcallers

The release of that viral street
harassment video last week prompted all kinds of interesting
reactions:
some took the strong this-is-awful-and-must-stop position,

some agreed street harassment was bad but not everything in the
video qualified,
others criticized  the problematic racial aspects of the
video, while still
others wondered what was so wrong with black and Latino men
giving compliments to women on the street.

As a libertarian, I had nothing special to say about the video
at first—harassment is bad, leave people alone, etc.— but then
the conversation took a predictable turn. Should the government
ban catcalling and police street harassment more aggressively?
Some people think so. The New York Times featured
a discussion on the topic. Here was the opinion of one legal
scholar, Northwestern University’s Laura Beth Nielsen:

The police may largely ignore harassment on the street because
men often do not understand how pervasive it can be, but most
importantly because there are no laws being violated in such
encounters. About two thirds of women report that they hear such
comments every day, but men’s estimates of the frequency of such
remarks is significantly lower. All of the women I
interviewed for my
researchreported changing their routes, behavior,
transportation or dress to avoid street harassment.

I’d propose a law that would prohibit street harassment and
would also be consistent with our First Amendment jurisprudence
about other kinds of hate speech (cross-burning
in Virginia vs. Black) that intimidates, harasses and
perpetuates inequality. It would allow states and cities to
recognize street harassment for what it is: physical and
psychological acts that intimidate, exclude, subordinate and
reinforce male dominance over women.

Empower the government to arrest people for giving unsolicited
greetings in public? Egads, what a terrible idea! (It’s as if
Nielsen was cognizant of the fact that libertarians were feeling
left out of this discussion and wanted to find a way to include us.
That’s nice of her, wrong though her opinion is.) New York City
cops certainly don’t need another reason to arrest black and Latino
men on the streets, for one thing. For another, trusting agents of
the state to correctly distinguish between protected and
unprotected speech is a tall order in the most favorable of
circumstances, and would only get worse if a broad new category of
speech was outlawed—to say nothing of the unlikelihood of such a
law passing a First Amendment test.

“Street Harassment Shouldn’t Be a Crime,”
agreed Lizzie Crocker of The Daily Beast. Crocker
chided Hollaback!, the organization behind the video, for
supporting efforts to legislatively prohibit such behavior and
claimed that “according to Hollaback’s mission statement, the group
is interested in modifying the law to punish offenders (and raising
significant First Amendment concerns).”

I poured over Hollaback!’s
website looking for evidence of this claim and was prepared to
skewer the group for pushing a pro-censorship and
pro-criminalization agenda. Alas, I found nothing of the sort.
Hollaback!’s strategy revolves around building a public awareness
campaign to shame street harassers into changing their ways. The
group does not specifically call for any sort of legislative
action, as far as I can tell.

To clarify the matter, I reached out to Emily May, co-founder
and executive director of Hollaback! She forwarded me a column
written by the group’s deputy director, Debjani Roy, about
“Finding Effective Solutions to Street Harassment”:

When it comes to combating street harassment, increasing
criminalization is not the answer.

The criminal justice system disproportionately targets and
affects low-income communities and communities of color, as
evidenced by more recent policies such as New York City’s Stop and
Frisk program and other degrading forms of racial profiling. Our
objective is to address and shift cultural and social dialogues and
attitudes of patriarchy that purport street harassment as simply
the price you pay for being a woman or being LBGTQ. It is not to
re-victimize men already discriminated against by the system.

So there you have it. Hollaback!—the organization behind the
viral street harassment video and primary activist group fixated on
this issue—does not support criminalization as an answer to the
problem. No one else should, either.