By Leslie Acosta and Gisselle Mireles, Staff Reporters
January, 2022
As young women, many of us have experienced an uncomfortable situation with a man. Recent studies show that 84% of females have been catcalled by the time they reach the age of 17. But what’s even crazier is that 13% of women are exposed to it by the age of 10. Because so many females experience many traumatizing situations they later struggle with anxiety and fear.
To understand the scope of this problem, we interviewed a variety of students and teachers on their personal experiences with catcalling, harassment and stalking. We were shocked to learn that all of them have experienced or heard a story of the matter.
Our first interviewee asked to remain anonymous and we asked if she had ever experienced an uncomfortable situation with a man. She responded with “Yes. It started in November of 2020. It was a week before Thanksgiving and I went to my godmother’s house to celebrate early. I had come in a little late to the party but when I walked in I saw this guy staring at me. I first thought that he was around my age because of his features. I sat down to eat and while I ate I kept hearing comments like ‘Ooh she’s cute, she’s pretty, she has a pretty body and that made me feel really uncomfortable.” We also asked if she had ever experienced stalking and she answered, “There was this one time that I was in my room cleaning and doing laundry when I looked up from my bed I saw him looking into my room just staring right at me.”
Our second interviewee was senior Kaylee Garcia, who recalled a traumatic experience at the mall with her friends in which a man initiated a conversation with her outside the restroom while she was waiting for a friend to come out, but ignored him and went into the restroom because she was nervous about being alone with a stranger. Garcia then says, “I went back out and he wasn’t there anymore, but then, with the group, I was with, we started walking around the mall, and…the same man started following us around. Then, we were going out of the mall and he was still following us around. We walked for a while to lose him…we eventually did lose him, but it was an uncomfy situation.”
We later went to talk to history and psychology teacher Amber Corral and asked her if she had ever been in a situation where a man made her uncomfortable. She responded with “Yes, it was at a bar. I was probably around 22, 23 years old, and my mom who was with me at the bar came and said ‘Hey it’s time to go to another bar.’ I was at the bar waiting to order a drink when I turned around to follow my mom out. A guy came up and smacked my butt looked at me to see my response and gave me a smirk on what are you gonna do about it. I was shocked because I had never been in a position like that before.”
Sexual harassment can also affect men. Our last interviewee was with senior Rodolfo Alcocer. We asked him if he had ever experienced an uncomfortable situation with a female. He answered, “It was a few months ago and I was at a party… I was with this girl and we hit it off but she wanted more and I was chilling. I said nah I don’t want to be doing that right now. And she kept getting too touchy and I was like nah bro nah. I brushed it off and was like it’s whatever and she told me to go into a room and she started to get really touchy again and I kept repeating nah I’m good. She got mad at me and started telling me if I didn’t like her or if I didn’t think she was pretty.”
One thing that all our interviewers agreed on was “What can we as a community do to help decrease the chances of this situation happening?” All our interviewers agreed that we need to teach our youth, not only guys but girls as well. Some of our interviewers repeated the phrase “boys will be boys” and so many of us have heard this at least once in our lives and it’s usually older women telling us that boys hit on us because they like said person. Instead of normalizing this, we have to teach our youth that a boy should be able to accept no for an answer and we shouldn’t be scared to say no. This isn’t only a girl’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem and we need to find a solution.
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