Cyber vigilantes deliver street justice

One of these days a woman will blog about some stranger subjecting her to catcalls on a Spokane sidewalk. That smackdown might well be posted on HollaBack Pacific Northwest.

Launched last year by Oregon State University grad student November Papaleo of Vancouver, Wash., the blog recently merged with HollaBack Seattle to cover all of Washington, Idaho and Oregon. It’s one of more than a dozen sites inspired by HollaBack New York City.

The movement was sparked in 2005 when a woman snapped a photo of a man pleasuring himself on a New York subway train. His identity was exposed after the New York Daily News published the picture, and he later pleaded guilty to public lewdness.

Galvanized by the incident, several women created HollaBackNYC.com, which regularly draws coverage from the likes of NPR, “Good Morning America,” the L.A. Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the BBC.

Although the HollaBack blogs are independent of each other, they all encourage women to post accounts of public sexual harassment—complete with photos of the creeps.

Site operators hope to start conversations about acceptable public behavior while humiliating harassers and providing victims a cathartic release.

It adds up to quite an empowering message. As Papaleo wrote on her MySpace blog, “What an astounding impact women can have when we establish our own agenda. This is my rally cry to my femme friends, my male friends, and everyone in between. Acknowledge your personal power (trite as it sounds) and try to make a small bit of difference today.”

But even this relatively benign brand of vigilante justice poses risks for all parties. Whipping out a camera phone to document harassment could trigger an assault, for instance.

“If the situation seems dangerous, taking a picture or remembering a description is of little importance,” HollaBack Seattle’s “frequently asked questions” page warned. But isn’t it difficult to dismiss any aggressive stranger’s potential for violence?

Personal malice or misunderstandings also could lead some women to post false accusations, as allegedly has happened on a similar site called DontDateHimGirl.com.

And people legitimately accused of impropriety could themselves end up victims of overzealous netizens. A South Korean college student discovered that the hard way in 2005. When she didn’t clean up a mess her dog left on a Seoul subway, another passenger took her photo and posted it online. Outraged readers soon began berating the young woman on the street and spreading her personal information in cyberspace.

Closer to home, syndicated Advice Goddess Amy Alkon recently took revenge on a diner who conducted a loud phone conversation in a California restaurant by blogging the woman’s name and cell number. Readers called her, and the incident received national press coverage.

Alkon dismissed critics of her action, writing, “Those who don’t want people to have their phone numbers shouldn’t shout them out in public.”

But for all the potential dangers of taking a vigilante stand, the HollaBack sites illustrate that public sexual harassment remains a widespread problem — opening the eyes of men who neither deal with it nor dish it out. Here’s a disturbing snippet from the Pacific Northwest blog:

“As I rounded the corner a man approached me from behind,” a Portland woman wrote of a walk home from the supermarket. “He asked if I knew what time it was. I said no and kept walking. He stayed within two feet of me, and moved to block my path and then in a really creepy voice he asked are you sure? That’s when I noticed his arm moving.”

For better or worse, these street-justice blogs help enforce social norms—giving us all one more reason to watch what we say and do under the vanishing cloak of public anonymity.