Calgary is examining whether it has the authority to outlaw street harassment, but the councillor behind the push to ban catcalling hopes the city’s bylaw officers would not have to enforce any rules. Instead, Druh Farrell envisages anti-street harassment bylaws working like Calgary’s rules against smoking indoors and near entrances.
The city rarely has to enforce its anti-smoking regulations, Ms. Farrell said, because it is now socially unacceptable to contravene the rules.
“We don’t have enforce that bylaw because society enforces that bylaw,” she said. “People would just speak up.”
Calgary councillors this week ordered officials to analyze its public safety bylaws through a gender lens and identify gaps. Council also asked bureaucrats to review whether the city has jurisdiction to pass bylaws against street harassment. Administration’s report is due in the first quarter of 2022, meaning it will be up to a newly elected council to determine whether to implement bylaws against street harassment.
Bylaws, Ms. Farrell said, are not so much about officers handing out tickets as they are about councils shaping society. “It is a stake in the ground stating this is no longer acceptable.”
In Canada, roughly 1 in 3 women, compared with 1 in 8 men, has experienced “unwanted sexual behaviour in public,” according to the federal government’s Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces. Unwanted sexual attention represented 25 per cent of unwanted sexual behaviour experienced by women in public, making it the most prevalent, according to the Statistics Canada survey.
Unwanted physical contact came second, at 17 per cent, and unwanted comments about their sex or gender made up 12 per cent of cases, the survey found. Younger men and women and people who are not heterosexual are more likely to be victims of street harassment, the survey said. Experts note racialized women, disabled people and others in the LGBTQ community are at greater risk, too.
Denise Brunsdon, a lawyer in Calgary who has studied street sexual harassment, said the Criminal Code can be used to address some forms of street harassment, such as public indecency, but municipal bylaws can help fill in the legal gaps. Prosecutors need extremely clear and repeated conduct in order to pursue stalking allegations under the Criminal Code, for example. This means street sexual harassers who target random women are immune from the law.
“A lot of cities are trying to lower the threshold, in recognition that a single instance of harassment should be adequate for sanction,” Ms. Brunsdon said.
A handful of Canadian cities have bylaws that – often in a roundabout way – could be used to address street harassment. In Edmonton, an anti-bullying provision dictates that people shall not “in a public place, repeatedly communicate, cause or permit communication, either directly or indirectly, with any person under 18 years of age in a way that causes the person, reasonably in all the circumstances, to feel harassed.”
In Vancouver, a noise bylaw states, “No person shall make or cause, or permit to be made or caused, any noise or sound in a street, park or similar public place which disturbs or tends to disturb unreasonably the quiet, peace, rest, enjoyment, comfort or convenience of persons in the neighbourhood or vicinity.”
Andrea Gunraj, the vice-president of public engagement at the Canadian Women’s Foundation, said municipalities can help curb gender-based sexual harassment and violence through bylaws even if they are lax on enforcement. Such bylaws can, for example, help better define harassment and then be used to support educational programs, such as bystander intervention strategies.
“It is very powerful and very important to stop the harm before it starts,” she said.
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Carrie Tait