People Are Applauding The Way This Man Stopped A Stranger Harassing A Woman

Immediately after President-elect Donald Trump won the US election, far-right “manosphere” influencer Nick Fuentes’ tweet, “your body, my choice,” went viral.

Followers of Fuentes have seized the phrase, using it in their replies to posts by women on various social media platforms over the past few days, and now some are worried that misogynistic rhetoric about women’s bodies will move offline as well. On TikTok, some parents have shared instances of boys taunting their kids with the Fuentes-coined phrase. Another woman said someone shouted the phrase to her on her college campus.

These reports might have something to do with why a thread about how easy it is to stop street harassment went viral on X (previously known as Twitter) over the weekend.

In a post with over 2.3 million views, fashion writer Cora Harrington shared how her husband responded to seeing a young woman being harassed on the subway.

“He’s not on here so he won’t see this, but on the way home tonight on the train, a young lady was being harassed by this man, and he just got calmly got up, and stood between them,” she wrote. “No bluster. No words exchanged. Just quietly stood there.”

“Like…it was just so smoothly and nonchalantly done. And it worked,” she wrote in a second post. “A potential situation was avoided. I love him.”

Down-thread, people applauded Harrington’s husband’s cool, calm and collected bystander intervention.

“That’s a real man right there,” one man said.

“More stories like this. Less stories of boys screaming: your body my choice,” another person replied.

Experts on anti-harassment training are singing his praises, too.

“I think thanks to Hollywood, people tend to think that bystander intervention involves direct conflict, and that if you’re not strapping on your superhero spandex and swooping down to save the day, it’s not worth intervening, but that’s simply not true,” said Emily May, the president and co-founder of Right To Be, a nonprofit organization working to end harassment through bystander intervention trainings.

As May told HuffPost, studies show that even something as small as a knowing glance can reduce the trauma related to harassment: “By standing in between the two people, [Harrington’s husband] showed the woman being harassed that he had her back and that she wasn’t alone,” she said.

In a nationally representative online study of 2,000 U.S.-based respondents in 2018, 77% of women reported experiencing forms of street harassment ― including unwanted touching and catcalling ― compared to 34% of men. (Transgender and nonbinary people and women with disabilities experience even higher rates.)

“When you think of how many times she has probably been harassed and no one has intervened, his actions were both healing and powerful,” May said.

There are endless ways to intervene that are low risk, said Lauren R. Taylor, the director of active bystander training organization, Defend Yourself, and author of “Get Empowered: A Practical Guide to Thrive, Heal, and Embrace Your Confidence in a Sexist World.”

“If a bunch of friends and a group are talking, and one of the men makes a derogatory comment about women, or one of the white people makes a derogatory comment about Black people, or anything else based on oppression, you can lean over and say quietly, ‘I’m not OK with that’ or ‘I disagree’ or ‘Please don’t say things like that,’” she said.

You can also intervene by addressing the person who is being targeted and say something like, “Do you want to move over to the next [subway] car with me?” or “Would you like help?” Taylor said.

Active bystander trainings, which became popular during the pandemic because of a wave of anti-Asian attacks across the country, usually touch on some variation of the “5 Ds of bystander training”: distract (by asking for directions, for instance); delegate (ask for help); delay (check in on the harassed person after the incident is over); direct (speak out directly to the attacker); and document (video or audio record).

Both Taylor and May said they worry that bad actors might exploit Trump’s recent political win as a rebuke of both reproductive and women’s rights.

Taylor noted that demand for bystander intervention skills “really shot up” in the wake of the 2016 election of Trump, and she thinks they might this time, too.

“Fears of harassment and even more extremely, fears of sexual assault, are very escalated right now ― and with good reason,” she said. “History has shown that people do take Trump’s rhetoric and behavior as permission.”

After the 2016 election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that there were 867 hate incidents across the U.S. in the 10 days immediately after, with many targeting immigrants, African Americans, Muslims and women.

In the wake of claims of harassment echoing Fuentes’ “your body, my choice” tweet, some detractors have characterized the reports as isolated or exaggerated. But there’s photo evidence of activists celebrating Trump’s win at Texas State University’s San Marcos campus with raised signs that read, “Women are property,” “Homo sex is sin,” and lists that designated women and slaves under “Types of Property.” (University administration have said the demonstrators were not affiliated with the school.)

For those worried about an uptick in this harassment, there’s agency and power in recognizing that being an active bystander doesn’t have to be some huge feat, inconvenience or oversized threat to yourself, Taylor said.

“I think people get stuck in societal messages like, ‘Maybe it’s none of my business’ or ‘Nobody else is doing anything, so I guess I shouldn’t do anything,’” she said. “I think most people want to do the right thing, but they are often stymied by confusion over what to do and how to do it safely.”

Bystander training ― even just reading up on it online ― helps encourage people to get past those barriers and take action.

“By empowering ourselves, we help empower others and vice versa,” Taylor said.