Let me tell you a story called Sexual Street Harassment

Note from the blogger:I decided to write in English because there´s a lot of people out there that should know about the reality of being a girl or a woman in Nicaragua. 

Hey friends from the international community, as part of this week against street harassment I wanted to share a story with you. 

I was born in a small Latin-American country called Nicaragua. Yes it sounds exotic and wild. It is, we are a multicultural and multilingual country, surrounded by the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean, we have a lot of volcanos, lakes, rivers, mountains and flat lands too. It is a very beautiful and amazing place to discover. But, behind amazing things there´s always a counterpart that we usually don´t talk about and like every country in the world, we have our problems. One of ours is called “machismo”.

Being a girl and/or a woman around the world is not easy. In a world dominated by men, we have to work twice as hard to get a good job and to maintain the job. Sometimes we have to leave our dreams or careers on “standby” if we want to become a mother or have a family. I don´t really think we should, but we were taught to do it. If we read a little bit of history we can see how the opportunities for women and men have never been the same, and even so, some of us managed to stand out and make the road and fight easier for new generations. Thanks to those fighters, women like me have the chance to write, communicate, express ourselves and keep fighting for our rights. We are called “feminazis” by ignorant people who don´t understand what we fight for and we are attacked by those who are afraid of changes, thinking that we want to steal their spaces. Those spaces which belong to us as much as to them.

It is our right to access public and semipublec spaces and to be able to do so freely and peacefully. We don´t want to be bothered, sexually harassed, followed and/or intimidated by anyone. We want to be able to walk with a skirt, with a dress, with long or short pants without any person blaming us for being attacked by somebody else. But that is what happens every day in my country.  After a long day at work we have to use public or private transport to finally get home. 35°C is the most common temperature in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, it´s a chaotic and dusty city. The traffic is heavy and it´s normal to get grumpy or angry because of the stress. Add the fact of getting harassed by five, fifteen or twenty men in a lapse of 5 minutes, no matter what you´re wearing, no matter the place, no matter your colour, or your shape, even when you´re sitting in your own car with the windows down. Just because you´re a woman and they (usually men) think they have the right to comment about your body or look. There are some that think that you actually like it.

This action has been normalized and even adopted as part of the “culture” and when you talk back, the violence can escalate very quickly. They shout at you, telling you´re crazy and justified their savage attitude by blaming you. You´re the one who provoked it, they question why you´re on the street by yourself if you don´t want to be “talked to”, or why you wear whatever you´re wearing or why you´re so pretty and sexy to their eyes. You can suddenly become a crazy bitch seconds later, after being “their love” or “honey” , all depending on your reaction to their harassment. Their position in the society is not important, you can get harassed by businessmen driving their expensive cars, by a guy on a bike, policemen or even the one that is looking for a job as a gardener. It´s a matter of man power or pride, they want to tell you that no matter what space you´re in, it belongs to them and if you want to make use of it, you have to accept whatever comes out of the mouths or minds. Sounds stressful, right? Well, my female friends, colleagues, unknown women and I, have to live with that reality every day of our lives in Nicaragua and even when more people are talking about it and finally realizing that it is not a “compliment” but “street harassment” there´s still a lot to do.  

But I dream that one day our society will make progress and accept that street harassment is not a compliment, but a threat to our security and health in general. I wish that maybe one day, our daughters would walk on the street without any fear or paranoia and that their fight would not be the same that this generation is fighting. That war should have been over and won years ago. 

Mar Pilz 

Communication 

Observatory Against Street Harasstmen in Nicaragua