This Woman Is Taking Selfies With All The Men Who Catcall Her
#DearCatcallers
A vast majority of women have experience with public sexual harassment. According to data from The Australia Institute released in 2015, 83 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 had been harassed on the street in the previous 12 months, while more than a half of the women surveyed revealed they had first experienced street harassment by the time they turned 18.
Despite the clear statistics, however, it can difficult for some people – particularly men – to comprehend just how widespread this kind of behaviour is. Which is why 20-year-old Noa Jansma spent the past month documenting her own experiences with street harassment via social media.
A design student studying in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Jansma spent September taking selfies with men who catcalled her, and shared them on her Instagram account @dearcatcallers. From late August to late September, she shared 24 selfies, along with captions describing exactly what the men said to her.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, Jansma said she had the idea for the project after a discussion about catcalling at university. “I realised that half of the class, the women, knew what I was talking about and lived it on a daily basis,” she said. “And the other half, the men, didn’t even think that this is still happening. They were really surprised and curious. Some of them even did not believe me.”
“This project also allowed me to handle catcalling,” she said. “They come in my privacy, I come in theirs. But it’s also to show the outside world that this is happening so often.”
Of the men in the photos, Jansma said she was initially worried about approaching them, but that most of the time they were happy “because they honestly think that they’re complimenting me. They really didn’t care about me. They never realised that I was unhappy.”
In some cases, however, she chose not to approach her harassers. “Of course, my safety is more important than this project,” she said. “I didn’t take photos when I was catcalled in the dark, in little streets.”
Jansma has finished with her month of posts, but intends to hand over control of the account to other women from around the world.