Marty Langelan has been harassed since she was six. At age nine, she wouldn’t go down to the store for bread and milk because a group of men who hung around the corner would say “creepy things” to her. Langelan tried to ignore them, a tactic her mother taught her, which didn’t work. Langelan then went to her mother’s older sister, Auntie Helen, who told her about the “F-Y response.”
“And that doesn’t stand for fiscal year,” Langelan said last night in Bulldog Alley during her presentation “Sexual Harassment Prevention: The Direct Action Toolkit.”
“I could silence an entire construction site by the time I was ten,” Langelan said. She added, however, that the “Auntie Helen technique” would not be effective today because the “shock factor” of vulgar language doesn’t exist anymore; if anything, the counter-aggression approach would only escalate the harassment.
Langelan has been researching sexual harassment intervention, prevention and risk reduction for the past thirty years. In addition to heading up the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, Langelan worked as a federal economist for 20 years. Drawing on her years of research, Langelan published a book in 1994 entitled Back Off: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers, which contains techniques that people, particularly women, can use to “nip [harassment] in the bud.”
Langelan offered eight of her methods to the room of about 12 women and a lone male last night. They ranged in creativity, from her “all-purpose statement,” to a more elaborate, advanced technique of the “questionnaire/survey,” Langelan’s personal favorite.
“It’s just really about stepping outside the victim box,” Langelan said. “It’s emotionally untenable to be passive in the face of abuse.”
According to Langelan, who has done research on these tactics internationally, the all-purpose statement works almost all of the time. It is as simple as saying, matter-of-factly, to the perpetrator: “Stop harassing women. I don’t like it—no one likes it. Show some respect.” Most of the time, Langelan said, the men will end up apologizing.
The survey method is best applicable for that gaggle of guys who whistle and hoot at women passing by. The woman would approach the guys, pull out a notepad and pen, and tell them she’s doing research on sexual harassment, could they please repeat their catcalls. Langelan warned, however, that this technique requires practice before execution.
“I think the A-B-C method is very effective,” Flavia Menezes (COL ‘08), co-chair of Take Back the Night, said of one of Langelan’s most basic techniques, in which the harassed says exactly what she doesn’t like, the effect it has on her and what she’d like the harasser to do in its place.
Menezes said she notices harassment “a lot” in and around Georgetown. Aside from the catcalls she deals with walking on M Street “all the time,” Menezes said she has a professor this term who has made “sexist remarks” upwards of five times in her two months of class.
Though enthusiastic about Langelan’s techniques, Menezes was unsure whether she would try them with this professor.
“It’s definitely hard, I don’t know if I could do it,” Menezes said.
“It takes a little while to fine-tune,” Langelan said, “but after you do it, it feels great.”
