SlutWalk through the Holy City

This article originally appeared on The Media Line.

Six young women stroll down King George Street less than a mile from the holy sites in the old city of Jerusalem, topless apart from a couple of strategically placed Xs of electrical tape. They sport political slogans dabbed across their stomachs – not a common site in the center of Jerusalem. The city’s fourth rendition of the SlutWalk movement aimed to be noticed.

“Every woman gets sexually harassed during her lifetime, at least once,” Shoshan Veber, one of the organizers of the protest, told The Media Line. SlutWalks are a protest against the blaming of victims of rape and the belief that women’s dress or actions cause the violence and harassment that is directed towards them daily, Veber said, asking – “Is it possible that every one of us is a slut?”

SlutWalks started in protest to comments made by a Canadian police officer in 2011 suggesting that if women didn’t want to be raped then they should not dress like sluts. Annual protests take place in a number of countries.

In Jerusalem, it felt like a party as the protestors met in the center of the city. A drum band played and chants of “No, means no,” rang out through a downtown square. Many of the protestors had come dressed wearing less than might be expected for a walk through the center of Jerusalem, with its population of observant Jews, Christians and Muslims. In the minutes before the march began protestors took time to paint slogans on each other: “Yes = Yes.”

“This walk says that it’s not our responsibility and not our doing when women are raped or sexually abused – it is the rapists’ fault.” Veber said. The finger should be pointed at him and not at his victim, the nineteen year old organizer said.

When it comes to the gender gap, Israel was ranked 65 out of 142, by the World Economic Forum a few places behind Thailand, but slightly in front of Italy.

“In terms of legislation on sexual harassment and human trafficking,” Israel is progressive Keren Greenblatt, a legal advisor to the Israel Women’s Network, told The Media Line. However in other areas, “marriage, divorce… enforcement and sexual and domestic violence, we are very much behind.”

Marriage and divorce are controlled by Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate, and there civil marriage does not exist. Domestic violence and familial murders are also more likely to happen amongst traditionally conservative communities; whereas teenage rape and discrimination or harassment in the work place are more prevalent among populations where women are integrated in school and in the work place, she said.

In many regards Israel suffers from the same problems as much of the rest of the world, Greenblatt said, including “discrimination of mothers and pregnant women, economic participation, sexual assault in campuses and schools, pay gap, access to healthcare and family planning.” Despite some areas for concern, Greenblatt said she was optimistic with the direction Israel is going in and that she believed the country’s legislators understood the necessity of pushing the country towards gender equality.

The SlutWalk which passed along Jerusalem’s busiest thoroughfare, at times held up the city’s light rail tram and certainly caught residents and shoppers’ attentions. The organizers estimated that around a thousand people attended. A high proportion of those marching were young women, in their late teens and early twenties.

Veber stressed that the march’s message – that is it wrong to blame the victim – is universal.

“This is not something specific for Jerusalem, it’s a worldwide problem,” she said, pointing out that the same issues could be found in London, Berlin, or elsewhere.

Other protestors disagreed, claiming that women in Jerusalem were under greater pressure than might be seen in less religious locations.

“I have noticed a certain amount of religiously based victim blaming,” Shiraz, a young woman who asked not to give her last name, told The Media Line. “I went to a religious school and once – (when) we were fourteen – our Hebrew teacher gave a lesson in class (where) she told us that if a woman dresses provocatively and she gets raped it’s her fault.”

This sort of message was not unusual during her education, said Shiraz as she distributed flyers to passersby. Not a part of the organizing team, Shiraz said she had volunteered to hand out information leaflets, because she believed strongly in the message of the march.

Women in Israel also buy into blaming the victim, she said.

As the protest marched down the street shoppers and residents stood and stared. Some were visibly shocked, others simply curious. Bystanders had a mixed reaction to the protest, Shiraz explained: some were offended and shouted at the protestors while others expressed sympathy for the march’s cause, after its purpose was explained to them.

“Your parents would be proud!” shouted a young Jewish man sarcastically as he filmed protestors marching past, on his phone. “I think it’s very good that women have respect for their own body but to walk around naked in the street in Jerusalem that also shows a big lack of respect,” the young man, an Australian named David, told The Media Line. “If they want to walk around half dressed – sweet – but to not wear anything at all… to wear no bra or anything else in the streets of Jerusalem….,” he said, shaking his head.

David said he sympathized with the point of the protest but thought a march through the streets was sufficient to make their point – the nudity was unnecessary and could offend religious Jerusalemites. “I mean it’s a very holy city,” he said.

The question of what defines violence towards women remains central to the issue of gender equality. The members of the SlutWalk through Jerusalem argued that harassment in the street and society’s tendency to question the morality of rape victims perpetuates attacks against women.

But violence does not just constitute physical attacks, Nurit Kaufmann, Head of the Women’s International Zionist Organization’s Violent Matters Department, told The Media Line. “When you have been beaten you know you are a victim,” she said. But when the violence is psychological – controlling behavior or a systematic erosion of a partner’s sense of self-worth – it can be just as harmful and even longer lasting.

Others would argue that harassment in the workplace was equally significant with a study from 2011 showing that 11.4% of female workers in Israel said that they had been harassed. Of these nearly one in ten said they left the job because of the unwanted attention.

Keren Greenblatt argues that it goes deeper than this, that discrimination towards women starts at birth. Many of the protestors at the SlutWalk were young women because harassment in the street was the form of discrimination they had experienced. But for many of them inequality in the work place or violence at home were a real possibility as they aged, Greenblatt said.

“The protests should be starting from infancy, where the discrimination and gendered education begin, and continue all the way through to discrimination in retirement pensions and women's poverty in the senior ages.”