The Coventry Harassment Project will give people the opportunity to share their experiences of street harassment in Coventry.
In 2012-13 Coventry Women’s Voices & Coventry University conducted a survey of women’s experiences of harassment in public spaces in Coventry. The survey found that 61% had experienced sexual harassment in the last 12 months, experiencing incidents which included unwanted sexual comments (37%), wolf-whistling (32%) and being groped (12%).
The report produced from this survey, ‘An Everyday Occurrence: women & street harassment’ serves as a springboard from which this project begins.
People will be able to share their experiences of harassment in two key ways:
People can follow, and submit their stories via the Twitter account @CovHarassment and Tweet with the hashtag #CovHarassment. In addition people can submit longer anecdotes to the email address CovHarassment@gmail.com. These submissions will be posted on a regular basis on Coventry Women’s Voices’ blog, here, (anonymity can be requested.)
Coventry Women’s Voices will collect and share these stories to create a fuller picture of what happens in Coventry, and where. This information will add to that collected in the survey and begin to map where, and how frequently people experience harassment in the City.
While our focus is on sexual harassment in public places we will log other types of harassment as they are sent in to us, and explore ways of working with local partner organisations if it becomes clear we need to broaden the scope of the project.
It is the intention of the project to regularly collate the information submitted, identify patterns and share the information with local government & police to help inform policy making.
The Coventry Harassment Project will be officially launched on 9th April 2013 during Anti-Street Harassment Week (7th-13th April), which is organized by the Stop Street Harassment organisation (http://www.stopstreetharassment.org).
Coventry Women's Voices 