I found this article about the legal failure to effectively prevent street harassment, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women by Cynthia Grant Bowman, on the Holla Back NYC blog. Their blog lists a lot of useful resources, including other groups fighting street harassment, news articles, and the New York Harassment Statute.

One thing that I think we need to keep in mind while putting together this pamphlet is that even after we figure out what it is we want to convey, I think it is (almost) equally important to figure out how to convey the information in a way that street harassers will actually read it, and be affected by it. Which seems difficult to me. It's difficult for me to imagine that a person who is compelled for some reason to make the statement "Girl, I'd so fuck you" to a stranger, would then be compelled to change his behavior if we handed him a pamphlet of our feelings. At the same time, I do think that it's important to convey how this kind of thing makes us feel.

I think that what I'm trying to say is that it should be stated as if we are in a position of power, if that makes sense, rather than as if we are making a plea for street harassment to stop. This is probably an obvious idea, but nonetheless.

Not only would I like to convey that this is degrading and uncomfortable to me, but also that it makes the street harasser come off, to me, as intellectually underdeveloped i.e. stupid. I would like to pose the question, what do you hope to achieve by yelling offensive, yet somehow mundane and simple, epithets and verbs at me? What is the point of this behavior, and how does it make the harasser feel? Is that power? To me, this kind of behavior can be explained by a lack of communication skills, social skills, experience operating within a modern civilized context, and/or cerebral development.

I think we should also include Ohio's Harassment Statute.

I think we should address the issue from a lot of different angles, including that street harassment is degrading and how that makes us feel, that it is idiotic and a turn off and makes harassers appear stupid, that it is outdated, that it is or should be illegal.