Introduction
I was having a good night.
I had traveled to New York City to visit with an old bandmate. Having just moved to the East Coast, my southern self did not think four hours seemed like a long time to drive anywhere, especially for a place that not only had bodegas, but bodegas that stayed open past 9:00 p.m. My friend and I were walking to a subway stop, deep in conversation. It was late, but I felt safe. I could walk down the street at night here and not be scared. There were lights on everywhere, cars were speeding by, people were walking all around. It felt like the city was alive. Aware. I was with a tall guy anyway, so I could relax, right? In my “at ease” state, I felt a hand haphazardly grab and squeeze my butt. The two guys we just passed on the sidewalk were now laughing behind me, quickly walking away. I turned around, stood in place, and yelled at them. “Hey assholes, don’t fucking touch me!” More laughs. They were halfway down the block when I said to the two people walking behind them, “You better check your friend, he just fucking grabbed my ass. Tell him that’s not cool!” I turned around and started moving, expecting my friend to keep up. I was fuming, complaining loudly about how the entire scene made me feel. After a few moments of silence, this close friend said, “You know, I don’t think those people were with those guys. I don’t think they knew what you were talking about.”
Not “That sucks, I’m sorry” or “What a couple of assholes” or “Drunk fucks; are you alright?” Nothing like that. Frankly, the woman stranger I told to check her “friend” seemed much more concerned about what had just happened than my actual friend. Looking back it feels like his only concern was whether or not I had responded “appropriately” to something wholly inappropriate. While I didn’t let being groped that night ruin the rest of my trip, I still think of that moment sometimes. I think it sticks with me because I felt violated, belittled, and alone in the span of five minutes. I wonder if I’d think about it as much if my friend had backed me up. Of course, it’s not his fault those guys touched me, but what if he had yelled at them with me, told me I was totally right to call them assholes, or even just given me a hug? Would men who think it’s funny to touch a stranger without their permission change their minds if they knew that stranger would have the support of all the people around them?
I have a few car stories, too. The one I often tell when I lead safer space workshops is about the time a guy got out of his car in the middle of an intersection to call me a “cunt” and an “ugly bitch anyway” (among other things) because I had the nerve to absentmindedly flip a middle finger in the air when he honked his car horn at me. That one shook me so hard that I froze until he drove off, and, when I started to walk again, I asked the first friendly person I saw for a hug. The wash of understanding and empathy on the person’s face allowed me to let out the tears I had been holding in. I got to share being upset with someone after feeling alone with an angry, reckless man. That is not meant to be poetic. For the full minute he was stopped and yelling at me, that block was deserted. I had no idea if he would run over to me and try to hurt me. I mean, if he was willing to stop and get out of his car in the middle of the street, then what else might he be capable of when a woman makes him angry?
I suppose it’s comforting that I get a lot of support from the people taking my workshops, a lot of “That’s nuts!” and “I can’t believe that guy did that!” or “All that because of a middle finger?” It’s obvious to them that his behavior in that moment was wrong. It’s also obvious, to me, that their disbelief at this bad behavior, which innocently comes from not experiencing it themselves, could set things up for making someone feel worse about the harassment they just faced. Any statement like “He really did that? Just because you did X?,” however well meaning, subtly shifts the focus from his behavior, where it should be, to mine.
Also, disbelief can be read as mistrust. It’s hard to hear “I can’t imagine why someone would do that” or “I’ve never seen anything like that,” because, well, I have. And so have lots of folks, for various reasons. I might suddenly be wondering if the person I’m telling my story to believes me and will support me, when I should be concentrating on calming down. I’ve had to lose a giant pickup truck that was following me on my bicycle, making me late for work. I’ve had to hear someone shout from a car full of men “Can I come over for some pussy later?” and then speed off, as I entered my dad’s house while on vacation, not knowing if they lived around there and would, in fact, come back later.
For people who experience harassment often—sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, or ableist—that feeling of “What else is this person capable of?” is common and stressful. It means you’re always on guard, waiting for harassment to happen, and knowing, when it does, that it might turn aggressive. All those “minor” instances of harassment can feel pretty major until they are over, because you can’t predict the future behavior of someone who is already cool with disrespecting a total stranger.
And each instance matters, because they add up. Those sense memories of feeling isolated and scared compound, making it hard to believe you’ll ever go anywhere without being harassed. You’ve learned to expect it. So much so that even when it doesn’t happen, your body has already prepared for it—narrowing your focus, tensing muscles, quickening your breath, and sharpening your mind in case you need to make an emergency decision to maintain your safety. Dealing with harassment is a stressor. According to Harvard Medical School, studies show that “repeated activation of the stress response takes a toll on the body,” contributing to high blood pressure as well as mental health concerns like anxiety, depression, and addiction.1 So while a wolf whistle or a quick shout of “Nice ass!” is not as bad as being groped by a stranger in the middle of the night or being followed by an intimidatingly large vehicle, it’s still bad because I don’t know if it will get worse. At its least physically draining (but most predictable), it’s a mere reminder of all the other times I have been harassed and felt “less than”—like my body doesn’t belong to me once I enter a public space; like I’m just a body, not a human being with my own thoughts, dreams, passions, and struggles.
The best way to lessen the feeling of isolation one gets from frequent, commonplace harassment, is to make the response to harassment a group effort. A 2012 study performed by the Worker Institute at Cornell University, reports that:
- When bystanders fail to act, their presence tended to compound targets’ negative emotional responses.
- Bystander interventions that had a positive influence on targets could be as simple as a knowing look or a supportive statement.
- When a bystander took action by confronting the harasser, harassment was more likely to stop.2
Those last two points are clear, but I want to emphasize the first. When you see harassment happening but do nothing to intervene, it makes the victim feel worse than if dealing with it alone.
The Worker Institute’s findings on the effects of bystander intervention were based on descriptions of harassment experiences submitted to the website of Hollaback!, a national organization to end harassment. I founded a Hollaback! chapter in Baltimore in 2011 to address just this problem. After both sitting with these findings for a while and adding basic bystander skills to the Street Harassment 101 workshops I was teaching, two events occurred that made it apparent that a local safer space campaign was not only needed in Baltimore but also that it could make a real difference.
Back in March 2013, our sister group in London shared some inspiring news with the Holla! community. They had just formed a partnership with Fabric, a local nightclub that was tired of hearing secondhand that women were being harassed in their venue. There are many reasons why women and LGBTQIA folks might not report harassment to an establishment’s security: fear of victim-blaming, not being taken seriously, possibly experiencing more harassment from typically male staff, and frustration at interrupting their good time to report it are just a few. By going the extra mile and partnering with Hollaback! London, and by pledging to remove harassers from their venue, Fabric showed their community that they prioritize the safety and comfort of their female patrons. Upon hearing this, the Hollaback! team in Baltimore said, “Why not us?”
A few months passed as we considered working on something similar. We then received an inspiring submission on Hollaback! Baltimore’s website: The owner of a restaurant called a cab for the victim of transphobic harassment and waited for it with them instead of leaving them alone outside during closing time. After reading a story that so perfectly demonstrated the ideal venue response to harassment, I, my fellow chapter leader Melanie Keller, and our friend and fellow activist Corey Reidy all teamed up to create the Safer Spaces Program in Baltimore. We wanted every restaurant, bar, club, and coffee shop in our town to respond to complaints of harassment in a supportive and consistent way, so that patrons knew what response they’d get when walking into that establishment. I’ve been training venues on how to best respond to reports of harassment and support people who get harassed in their space ever since. It’s essentially highly tailored bystander intervention.
Shawna Potter, Melanie Keller, and Corey Reidy. June 25, 2013.
A few years ago, I needed to step back from my leadership role at Hollaback! in order to devote more attention to my band, War On Women. I’ve played guitar and been in bands since I was twelve and music is an incredibly important part of my life.
Having stepped back, though, I realized that training venues to become safer spaces was not something I could give up. Nor, as it turned out, did I have to. As I knew from personal experience, music venues can be serious hotbeds of harassment. I could take the Safer Spaces Program on the road, offering trainings to the places where I performed. Through the Entertainment Institute, I was even able to teach safer space tactics to small groups of audience members on the Vans Warped Tour during the summer of 2017. By the end of that summer, I realized I was having nearly identical conversations with attendees, addressing the same questions. My band was performing almost daily on that tour and I was so concerned about saving my voice in order to last the two-month duration that I thought, “What if I just put all this stuff in a book?” That way, next time around, I could save my voice, reach more people, and anyone who read it would be equipped to have those same conversations, too.
As much as I’d love to, it’s not logistically or financially feasible for me to personally teach a workshop in every venue around the country, but this information should be in the hands of as many people as possible. I figured it would be much easier and cheaper for venues to read a book and implement what they can. So I wrote one.
My hope for this guidebook is that it can act as a minimum, agreed-upon standard for how every space should operate in order to protect the rights of the people within it to feel physically and mentally safe, supported, and respected. I hope the suggestions are clear and actionable. Where you take it from there is up to you and your community.
Again, what if my friend in New York had had my back? What would I remember from that night then? What if I had never seen a friendly face after being screamed at in broad daylight, and I’d held those tears in? What effect would that have on my body after years and years of harassment? My mind? My confidence in myself? My confidence in others?
On that night ten years ago, I was having a good time. I don’t want any more good nights ruined by harassment—for anyone. There will always be assholes, but if you have my back and I have yours, we can face them together. They’ll shut up eventually—trust me; we just need to make it clear that they are outnumbered.
Who Is This Book For?
This book is for every house party, basement show, art opening, punk club, community space, library, free farm, sex toy shop, improv group, co-op, coffee shop, piano bar, metal bar, social group, game night, festival, scene, and space where people gather.
Whether you own a space, help run it, work for it, volunteer for it, or just patronize it, this book is for you. Whether you think that space has room for improvement, or if you already love the vibe and just want to keep it, this book is for you. I will tell you now, though: there is always room to improve.
Even if you’re not the boss, or your coworkers are not on board, you can still make a huge impact on people’s lives by doing everything in this guide that is within your power. No one is ever just an individual. You exist within spaces all the time, and you share some responsibility for what happens there. Your first priority can be everyone’s safety, and you can achieve that without cops, violence, or, if you’re running a business, any sacrifice to profits—or fun! Cool, right?
Why Safer Spaces?
“One of the foundational parts of building a community is drawing boundaries about what is considered acceptable behavior; it’s normal for people to decide that certain actions have no place in civil society.”
—Jessica Valenti, The Guardian, June 25, 2018
There is no such thing as an entirely safe space. No one’s safety or comfort can be guaranteed 100 percent of the time. This book is about safer spaces. However, it’s important to point out that, as I use the term, a “safer space” is not one free of challenging ideas or different opinions. It’s not about avoiding exposure to people who are different from you. It doesn’t even promise that harassment and violence will never happen. But we can always make spaces safer, first by acknowledging that some people are discriminated against just for being who they are, and then by doing what we can to ensure they are believed and supported if it happens on our watch.
The meaning of “safe space” has evolved since the term was first coined. This will likely continue as communities decide for themselves what is or is not acceptable behavior. The concept first arose in the context of “sensitivity training” for corporate management by psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1940s.3 As part of a leadership training program developed by Lewin, who founded the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, sensitivity training was a form of “group discussion where members could give honest feedback to each other to allow people to become aware of their unhelpful assumptions, implicit biases, and behaviors that were holding them back as effective leaders.”4 The term “safe space” itself is largely reported as gaining traction in the 1960s gay liberation movement and 1970s women’s movement. First, gay and lesbian bars served as physically safe spaces where one could behave, dress, and love the way one wanted, out of the public eye. Second, as scholar and activist Moira Kelly writes in her book Mapping Gay L.A., “in the women’s movement, [it] was a means rather than an end and not only a physical space but a space created by the coming together of women searching for community.”5 Safe space began to mean “distance from men and patriarchal thought.”6 As the work of Black feminist legal experts, scholars, and activists became more widely known in the 1980s and ’90s, so did the idea that the limitless intersections of identity, and therefore the way people experience harassment and exclusion, could never be perfectly addressed in any space, so safer spaces became the more accurate way to describe these efforts. Malcolm Harris explains how these ideas were being put into practice when the term “safe space” hit the mainstream:
By the time I showed up in left-wing spaces in the early 2000s, that meant horizontal organization and consensus instead of majority rule. It has also meant gender-neutral bathrooms, asking people’s preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, internal education “anti-oppression” trainings, and creating separate auxiliary spaces for identity groups to organize their particular concerns. Occupy Wall Street gave these ideas international exposure, but they’re not new. Among the likeminded, the “safe space” designation came to signify a set of standard respectful practices.7
So this term has gone from describing feeling safe enough to express your opinions without being judged for them, to expressing your true self without fearing violence or arrest, to providing a physical space away from members of your groups’ oppressor class, to allowing room to take intellectual risks in order to encourage open dialogue.
In this book, I want to promote creating physically and emotionally safer spaces. Building upon the work of everyone who has come before, I hope the pages ahead will help take the concept of a safer space out of academia, out of small pockets of alternative or counter culture, and make it something that can thrive anywhere. The idea that everyone should be treated with respect and autonomy should no longer be considered radical. You do not need to be an activist to ensure people have a good time at your venue. It is not overreacting to say “We don’t allow hate speech or harassment in this establishment.” It is underreacting to let it slide. Besides, who deserves access to true leisure time more? People trying to ruin other people’s fun or the people who often get their fun ruined?
What Harassment Looks Like
Harassment can be verbal or physical. It can be based on sex, sexual preferences, gender, religion, race, ability, size, age, class, or any combination of these. It can feel intimidating, hostile, or abusive. Harassing behavior may include name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule, offensive pictures, and more. It can go from something as simple as being leered at, to being followed in, around, or out of a space. It can be an “accidental” inappropriate touch or an insulting “joke” based on stereotypes. It can be vulgar or offensive slurs mumbled under the breath or yelled out in front of a crowd. It can be a forceful grab over or under clothing, or it can be a forced display of self-manipulation. Most importantly, what someone else would consider harassment might not be harassment for you. You don’t need to memorize every potential type of harassment. When someone tells you they were harassed (whether or not they use that word), you just need to remember one thing: believe them.
For the purposes of this book, the harassment we will focus on is the kind that happens in public or semi-public spaces. There are specific protocols and resources available to people experiencing harassment in educational spaces or the workplace, so we’ll mostly leave them aside in the pages ahead. In theory, there are more protections at school or work than in other public spaces, but in practice we know that that’s not always the case, so feel free to take what we cover here and apply it to any situation, as needed.
Wherever harassment happens, victims are habitually not believed and pushed to remain silent in the hope that the situation will just go away. Simultaneously, systemic racism leads to an imbalance in consequences: people of color, especially Black men, are more likely to face those consequences, and those consequences are likely to be more severe than they are for white people. We don’t want to repeat our society’s egregious failings by answering one form of injustice with another. We are not here to profile anyone. And, equally, we will not force victims to remain silent. While certain aspects of harassment and safety can be fairly clear-cut—and I’ll hopefully be making them clearer in this book—they are embedded in the context of a society that is unjust and unequal in so many ways. That means that we need to operate with honesty and directness. Foregrounding victims—their experiences, their stories, their needs—is an important first step.
This Book Has Grown
Once I had the idea to put the tactics I’ve been teaching venues into writing, I felt compelled to publish something as soon as I could. This information is meant to be shared, and it seemed important to get it out into the world quickly. So, before I wrote the book you’re reading, I collected some basic ideas and boiled them down in a small pocket guide that people could easily pass around. AK Press published that in 2018. If you’ve read that pamphlet, you should be familiar with the some of the basic lessons in this book. If every person at every venue read those tiny forty-eight pages, we’d all have a common language and set of skills to start with as we work to improve our communities and ourselves. This book contains everything in the pocket guide, and it also builds upon it. It goes into more depth than its predecessor, providing more explanations, research, and real-world examples of these tactics in use. Throughout the book you’ll also find personal stories, submitted by people with differing responsibilities within their space as well as people who experience harassment, all of which I hope will help illustrate the need for safer spaces in the first place.
As you read, I invite you to think about how everything in this book could apply to you and your space(s). Don’t get hung up on any of the terms I choose. When I describe what a space’s “owner” can do, feel free to substitute whatever appropriate term applies to your situation and whoever it is that’s taking responsibility for how your space operates: employee, volunteer, member, manager, or any other title. What I describe as a “bartender” might be, for you, a different role: security guard, door person, cook, barista, sales associate, or technician. You can substitute “customer” with “patron,” “client,” “audience,” “attendee,” “member,” or any other term you feel best describes the people being welcomed into the space.
The point is to make this book and the ideas in it your own. I’m thankful that you’re reading it in the first place, and I hope you find everything I’ve added to be helpful.
1 “Understanding the Stress Response,” Harvard Mental Health Letter 27, no. 9 (March 2011): 4–5.
2 Mary Catt, “Hollaback to Catcalls,” Cornell Chronicle, May 1, 2012, http://news.cornell.edu/essentials/hollaback-catcalls.
3 Alfred J. Morrow, The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 210–214.
4 Vaughn Bell, “The Real History of the ‘Safe Space,’” Mind Hacks website, November 12, 2015, https://mindhacks.com/2015/11/12/the-real-
history-of-the-safe-space/.
5 Moira Kenny, Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 24.
6 Malcolm Harris, “What’s a ‘Safe Space’? A Look at the Phrase’s 50-Year History,” Splinter News website, November 11, 2015, https://splinternews.com/what-s-a-safe-space-a-look-at-the-phrases-50-year-
hi-1793852786.
7 Ibid.