Here's the link: film.

This has been going around twitter for a few days and I thought I'd repost it here because it's the kind of thing KR is sometimes interested in. It packs a lot into a minute and a half without preaching or narrating, and if you have any friends who've questioned whether street harassment happens, or that it has any negative effects, you might like to share it on your facebook or twitter pages.

There's another really good film on street harassment from 1998 that seems worth posting alongside this: War Zone by Maggie Hadleigh-West. I don't know if it inspired Hollaback a few years later, but it certainly prefigures those ideas. It misses out some of the ways harassment has changed as technology has changed - mainly the rise of cameraphones - but the way she challenges her harassers, and the reaction they have, is still something very much worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

I have to say I experienced the same thing in places in the Netherlands... they mention that it was mainly north African men doing it, well it was for me too and I was with a guy some of the times it happened. The worst was about 6 guys cornering me and calling me a ***** in Dutch over and over again, they wouldn't let me pass and kept blocking me in until I cracked the mega ****s and started getting all "Australian" on them.

She gets this eight to ten times a day? Avoid Brussels.

That's horrible, I would have been really scared.

I'm really cautious about raising any race element because north Africans are such a stigmatised population in Europe, and I don't want to add to that, but I know that the north African theme is often raised by European women talking about harassment.

I noticed this when I was working in Limoges aged 17; one particularly scary incident was a guy who followed me while I was walking home through the centre, repeatedly asking me if I'd go back to his house, and walking alongside me in a way that pushed me closer to side streets. I looked young for my age and had no idea how to react to that level of close-up intimidation. Thinking about it later, it's disturbing.

Still, I get plenty of harassment in the UK, where there are very few north Africans. Most of it is while riding my bike, which is so dangerous, but men don't think about how you could die on the roads when their need to tell you they'd **** you is so much more urgent.

How does harassment in Australia compare to Holland, Mrs R?

Yeah, it's not a good tourist advert, but then it's not uncommon in Sheffield for me to get harassed three times in a day. It makes me think of this cartoon (I don't like the artwork style, but the message is good):