A Student’s Perspective on Street Harassment
In one of Silk Road’s recent public speaking classes, one of the students gave this passionate speech about street harassment in Afghanistan. She agreed to write it down for us to share here. We have left the writing as is, in order to show how well she can write in English.
Imagine you are a young woman and your entire dream is just having the right of education but when you go out of the house, you face street harassment on your way to school. First you face a young boy, while crossing he shouts at you and says “WHERE ARE YOU going honey?” And laughs with his friends, you try to ignore them and just keep going…after 7 minutes walking, you see a middle aged man staring from faraway to all over your body, when you notice that you feel ashamed of what you have worn today and just try to walk faster and find a way to hide yourself.
Then an old man crossing you in a narrow road, while crossing he just tells you rubbish and abusive things and calls the names of your private parts of your body, this time your face turns red and you start blaming yourself for coming out of the house…while you are talking with yourself and getting closer to school, suddenly a boy on his bike comes from your behind and touches your back, This time, on the street where everyone is watching you…you feel extremely shocked and you feel more than terrified an unsecured, you want to scream and cry, and blame your family for bringing you into this violent world and keep wishing that you were a boy instead of being a girl and you just regret living your life this way…that’s how girls and women experience life in Afghanistan where in any case they are guilty not victims just because they are women. These are not only your neighbor’s women or your classmates, they are those women who you calls them your mother, sister, or wife.
Street harassment is a big phenomenon in Afghanistan and everywhere in the world, but it’s extremely horrible in Afghanistan. It causes lots of damage to one or more than one life, by creating fear inside of every woman; it kills their dreams of gaining education and wishes of grabbing achievements. It can corrupt a society by bringing high statistics of illiteracy among women, this is what happened here in our country we have 16% of educated women, can you imagine a situation of a country where its women are illiterate and those women can give birth an illiterate society?
Women have many pressures in their life specially when they are living in a patriarchal society, When you are a woman and you want to work and study at the same time you need to clean your house, cook and take care of your children, but it is not the same about men.
Even though women face different kinds of violence at home and outside of the house their whole life and the statistics of violence is getting high year by year, On the other hand there are many men and women who are working together against this phenomenon today without being dependent to any NGO. As an adult girl living in such a country I feel very responsible for my country. 4 years ago, After I discovered my propose of life, I decided to work as a volunteer member of one of those independent organizations to fulfill my obligation by helping them fight against violence especially street harassment. That’s why I’d like to ask you all today to lets understand a women’s situation in Afghanistan and respect them as a human being. I want to ask you that when you see someone is abusing a woman on the street please try to encourage her by standing against that, otherwise if you just watch and ignore that, you will also be guilty. I believe we are all parts of the same body of our society and we are all responsible, let’s gather together and work for change without considering the gender or race and not let future generation to blame us of being silent as we blame the past generation.
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