03/07/2025
Just following up on the story I posted yesterday — yes, I reported it.
It wasn’t dramatic. Just two men in a white van doing what men in white vans do: trying to intimidate two women walking down the street in broad daylight.
One of them even had a wedding ring on.
We walked away fine (apart from a horse throat from yelling some very pointed f-bombs), but I spent 30 minutes filing a police report — not because I felt scared, but because I’ve learned from working with that these behaviours of concern are often the first rungs on the ladder toward something worse.
They don’t usually start with violence — they build to it.
And that 30-minute report? It might be the thing that helps a future victim, or that allows police to say “we’ve got them on the radar” before something escalates.
This is what being an upstander looks like. It’s not about drama. It’s about drawing a line and saying “this is not okay”—for ourselves, for other women, for the women who don’t get to walk away yelling.
What really hit me, though, is this: harassment is so common for us that we almost don’t register it anymore. But the men in our lives often never see it — not because they don’t care, but because it never happens when they’re with us.
It’s invisible to them. And that invisibility is part of the problem.
So here’s my idea: a new family WhatsApp thread where we just drop in every daily incident. No drama, no detail — just “White van. Verbal. Broad daylight. 3:10pm.”
Not for sympathy. Just so they see what we see. The volume of it.
They are our allies. But this is a crime that’s largely invisible to them. *xualharrassment
