Mark, our media officer, sits down with Jay Ooi to discuss his experience growing up Asian in Australia and the importance of intersectionality in storytelling. Jay is the host of Shoes Off, an award-winning podcast exploring Asian Australian culture and what it means to be Asian in Australia.

In line with Sexual Violence Awareness Month, this blog piece explores how sexual violence and street harassment exist on the same spectrum of gender-based violence and reflect existing power structures within our society. Our community liaison officers, Alex and Cheryl, take a closer look at the community attitudes and culture which contribute to the normalisation of street harassment and sexual violence and propose ways we can resist these harmful mindsets by opening up uncomfortable conversations with our community and peers.

As street harassment has garnered more attention in countries around the world, governments have increasingly turned to criminalisation as a way of curbing its prevalence in our societies. In this blog post, our co-founder Annelise Lecordier explores why this approach isn’t the be-all end-all solution it is often upheld as - resulting instead in some very serious shortfalls when it comes to addressing street harassment.

Started in 2018, Private Places, Public Spaces is a Sussex-based project led by Dr Hannah Mason-Bish and Dr Amy Kavanagh aimed at documenting the experiences of disabled women and non-binary people with intrusive behaviours, harassment and unwanted touching in public spaces. Through the collection of personal stories, the research project has been exploring the nature of these interactions and the ways in which they might affect or limit disabled women and non-binary people’s freedom of movement. In this piece, Dr Hannah Mason-Bish shares with us how the project came about and the early findings that have come out of it.

(Photo Credit: Amelia Butlin)

As it’s Homelessness prevention week, we’re highlighting one of the fantastic organisations in Melbourne who have been doing incredible work in the homelessness sector. We had the chance to talk with Olivia Myeza from Hope Street about what homelessness currently looks like in Melbourne and what the future holds. The staff at Hope Street, like many homelessness services, are currently front of the line during the pandemic, ensuring the most vulnerable members of society have access to shelter and protection at this critical moment in time. Young people are disproportionately represented in the homeless population; 39% of Victorians counted as homeless on Census night were under 25 years old. The pandemic has exacerbated the existing affordable housing crisis and unemployment, and this has hit young people the hardest. It’s clear that organisations like Hope Street are more vital than ever in our communities.

In this piece, Professor Laura Logan explores the links that exist between ending street harassment and ensuring the enjoyment of our full democratic rights. Using her own personal experiences as a starting point, Laura examines the role that street harassment plays in policing ‘difference’ in public spaces and how, through this process of demarking their use as to be enjoyed only by some, street harassment can become a blow to the very concept of living democracy.

In this piece, Tina Dixson, a feminist academic, PhD Candidate at ANU and the Chair of the Forcibly Displaced People Network, highlights the discrimination and sexual harassment experienced by queer refugee women, in the context of safety promised by a protection visa - which has not been fulfilled. She interrogates the ways in which normalised homophobia and transphobia have intersected with patriarchal norms to harm queer refugee women in precarious situations.

As protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement spread around the world, Simone Kolysh contextualises their years of research on street harassment as part of a larger call to dismantle violence in public spaces. In this piece, they reflect on how violence in the public sphere flows in and out of violence experienced in private spaces while identifying the common thread that runs between all forms of street harassment - a need for some to exert power over their chosen targets.

Today marks the 2-month anniversary of the launch of the COVID-19 Racism Incident Report survey. Led by Erin Wen Ai Chew of the Asian Australian Alliance in collaboration with Osmond Chiu, the survey sought to create a database of racist incidents experienced by Asian Australians in the months following the pandemic’s spread. The goal was to provide a more accurate representation of the increasing number of racially-motivated abuse, including numerous instances of street harassment, that Asian Australians were being subjected to at a time where rhetoric around the virus was particularly divisive. In this piece, Erin shares with us some of the findings that have come out of the survey so far and reflects on what it says more generally about racism in Australia.