Sexual harassment series features local organization (Eyewitness News)
Nov. 20. 2018 – Eyewitness News
Equality Bahamas founder and co-director, Alicia Wallace featured in Eyewitness News on November 20, 2018.
From Eyewitness News:
“Pretty much anywhere that you can think of, where women visit, sexual harassment happens there and we have largely helped people to determine how to intervene,” Wallace said.
Wallace’s desire to lead the Hollaback movement in The Bahamas came in 2013, when a friend was very adamant about ending the experience of sexual harassment in public spaces.
Wallace was also fed-up with some of the comments of men while in public spaces, so she reached out to the international Hollaback organization and looked at ways to launch the initiative in The Bahamas.
“I went to the website and saw that they actually trained young people to run their own organization, so I signed up immediately and I was sold from the beginning. I signed up for the training, did a few months of training in New York City, and I joined at the time with about 82 cities around the world.
“It is truly a global organization and it was really a great experience to be a part of this training programme, to join this community of people who were fighting something that people here [in The Bahamas] are trying to convince you does not exist or is not a problem.
“So, it is a sort of empowerment for other people to validate your experience and say yes, what you are experiencing is problematic, yes it is trauma causing, and we do need to do something about it to bring it to an end.”
Wallace said Hollaback Bahamas has done some training on bystander intervention and they have also advised persons of how to deal with sexual harassment.
“It is in the workplace, but they actually don’t want to take it to human resources; or they work in a small business where there isn’t a separate human resources department so there really is nowhere for them to go with the complaint other than the owner or the manager,” Wallace explained.
“Sometimes that owner or manager is the person who is the perpetrator, so a lot of what we do [at Hollaback Bahamas] is helping women to figure out exactly how to navigate it [sexual harassment] without having to report it to HR if that is something they are not comfortable with doing.”
“I went to the website and saw that they actually trained young people to run their own organization, so I signed up immediately and I was sold from the beginning. I signed up for the training, did a few months of training in New York City, and I joined at the time with about 82 cities around the world.