Leave the miniskirt at home. Don’t walk alone. Wear a wedding ring.
Northwestern females who study abroad hear a number of precautionary tips before heading to another country. They read the “Women Traveling Abroad” articles and pack the pre-departure handbook. They keep an emergency contact card – with numbers for University Police and study abroad officials – in their wallets. And though no statistics on the frequency of harassment abroad exist, the women know it could happen to them.
Yet more women are making the journey than ever and trends suggest that many students still think the pros of going abroad outweigh the cons. Over the past decade, the number of U.S. females abroad increased by 150 percent. At NU, the number of females studying internationally almost doubled in five years – from 262 in 2002-03 to 474 during the 2006-2007 school year. And NU women have consistently outnumbered men in study abroad: in the past five school years, females have made up more than 67 percent of those who choose to go.
Many of these women who traveled overseas quickly learned to manipulate their appearance to make themselves more comfortable. “Once they know you’re foreign, you’re done,” says Weinberg junior Seethal Kumar, an Indian-American who spent six weeks of summer 2007 in Istanbul, Turkey, through a NU study abroad program. Her darker skin tone helped her blend in, she says, and she was bothered less on the streets when she was walking by herself; most people assumed she was Turkish. But Kumar noticed an increase in catcalls when she went out with white girls from her program, or if she spoke English in a store. “They knew you were American then, and immediately it was like, ‘Oh, I’ll give you ten Euro off if you give me a kiss.'” American girls are considered “easy” there, she says.
She wasn’t the only one to encounter that perception abroad. “As soon as they heard that I was American, I got lumped into a double category,” says Weinberg senior Anne Leung, who is Chinese-American. “I was the docile subservient sex kitten and the American slut.” Leung traveled to Madrid for Winter and Spring quarters in 2007. During her five-month stay, she was propositioned for sex twice. The first time, she was waiting for a friend at a busy street corner three blocks from an area notorious for prostitutes. “How much?” asked a man as he brushed by her. “I knew enough Spanish to know he wasn’t asking what the time was,” she says. “Are you working right now?” he asked next. Leung was furious. “Just because I was a minority, I wasn’t necessarily a prostitute,” she says. When she found herself in a similar situation a second time, she wasn’t as surprised. With Asian features, she already stood out. “I wasn’t going to be under the misconception that I could blend in at any point, no matter how good my Spanish became,” she says. “People see you before they hear you.”
People saw Cambrey Thomas. During her six-week summer stay in Croatia, the Medill junior often felt people staring at her. “I was the black girl,” she says. “There was no, ‘This is Cambrey, she likes the color blue.’ I was the black girl.” Thomas was the only black student in a group of 20 in the NU-organized program and saw few others anywhere in Dubrovnik. “I was treated as the black girl that they see in the music videos,” she says. “I dress pretty conservatively, but I was getting looks from men like I was wearing a two-piece string bikini.” Thomas says men verbally taunted and grabbed her with their hands. Sometimes “they just wouldn’t let go,” she says.
And it isn’t just on the street where women who study abroad report experiencing sexual harassment. For Weinberg senior Lindsay Wood, who spent February through May 2007 in Bamako, Mali, the trouble started when she went home. For four months, she occupied a mini-bedroom in a small house shared with a family of six siblings in their 20s and 30s, a 12-year-old cousin and a 4-year-old niece. Wood’s 28-year-old host brother was the head of the household, the “dad.” He often stroked her arm when they were out together and her head when she was in her room studying. He once told her, “If you do ever want to do anything, I’ve been tested for HIV, and I don’t have it.”
Wood knew she needed to do more than just brush off advances from her host brother, especially after discovering he had slept with one of the ten American girls he hosted before her. But her host brother was her closest friend, and he determined all of her social interactions. By observing his relationship to his female siblings, she quickly learned that standing up to the head of the family was unacceptable. “If this had happened in the U.S., I would’ve confronted it immediately,” she says. Instead, Wood spent two-and-a-half months feeling uncomfortable until she told Mohammed she and her ex-boyfriend back home were back together, even though they weren’t. “Harassment there seemed sort of like a given,” she says. “So the entire experience requires a mindset that is ready to accept a lot of challenges a lot of the time.”
Lynn Whitcomb, a senior lecturer in the Program of African & Asian Languages and study abroad adviser at NU, prepares her students by putting the nature of such pestering into a cultural context. She used to live in Cairo and advises women studying abroad there to expect some level of harassment. “Most Egyptian men can’t marry until they’ve acquired enough money and own an apartment and can support a wife,” says Whitcomb. “And they can’t have sex till they’re married. So the libido is high, and so are the offenses toward women.” Alison, a Medill senior, was one of the students with whom Whitcomb shared this advice. She struggled almost daily in Cairo. “Every morning there were at least 50 men outside of this building on my way to school,” she says. “Every time I had to walk past them, it was the worst part of my day. Some will say things, some will make gestures. But you find a way to deal with it.” At first, she didn’t want to just listen to the hisses and the “nasty” sexual connotations. “But then I realized I really can’t change the entire society like that. They’re just gonna think I’m some crazy bitch from America,” she says. “At the risk of sounding cheesy, I think it made me a stronger, more mature person.”
Some women study guidelines to prepare to stand up to sexual advances abroad. “We learned phrases to get people to leave us alone,” says Kumar of her time in Istanbul. “That helped cut down the harassment. And the basic rule of thumb is: Don’t make yourself stand out of the crowd more than necessary,” she says. “If it’s not part of the cultural norm, of course people are going to stare at you.”
The NU Study Abroad Office covers harassment and gender issues abroad during a mandatory pre-departure orientation, and the office’s Web site and handbook offer guidelines to staying safe. A link to the International Center at the University of Michigan provides basic safety tips for women abroad: Look confident and alert when walking, and, if lost, try to ask another woman for directions. Know how to use local phones and – if available in the host country – carry extra cash to hail a cab and avoid walking alone through suspicious neighborhoods. Dress as the local women do. Another Web site, Journeywoman.com, suggests purchasing a local store’s shopping bag and carrying belongings that may identify the woman as a tourist – camera, map, a dictionary, perhaps – in said bag. Or learn simple phrases to counter suitors on the street, as Leung did in Madrid. She swore by the phrase “tengo novio” (“I have a boyfriend”) when propositioned.
Leung also learned the stereotypes about women in Madrid by talking to her Spanish conversation partner. She adapted by trying to respect her culturally Catholic environment as much as possible. She bought her first pair of pantyhose to set the right impression. “If you don’t wear them, you’re a slut. It implies easy access,” she says. “My goal was to learn about people, and I thought that would be much easier if I was not offend
ing them with my clothes.” But Leung had to fight hard against preconceptions about women from the U.S. “American girls are portrayed in movies and music videos as women who will hook up in a bar bathroom,” she says. “On the prowl, reading Cosmo, making the first move if the guy doesn’t.”
But stereotypes about the American woman may be grounded more in Hollywood than in reality. Research by The Alan Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual and reproductive health, show that the American woman is no sooner sexually active than those of the same age in other developed countries. She is only slightly sooner active than her contemporaries in developing countries. But just because the reputation of American women isn’t faring too well abroad, it doesn’t mean they should stay home, Whitcomb says. “If you try to find something that will be simple and safe to the greatest degree, you’re never going to go anywhere or do anything,” she says. “Even if you go to some neighborhood in the States that you’re unfamiliar with, you may get harassed.”
And even those women who experienced harassment abroad don’t regret their travels. For Thomas, it was a lesson in confidence. “I can’t lock myself up because people are going to make comments or gestures,” she says. Kumar can’t wait to go back to Turkey, and Leung’s stint in Madrid inspired her next tattoo, the Spanish word dirección (which means, “direction”).
Studying in a foreign country completes a well-rounded undergraduate education, says Bernhard Streitwieser, associate director of the Northwestern Study Abroad Office. “You gain insights and have experiences that help you become a more globalized citizen,” he says. “You’re understanding how pople with different perspectives regard you and your point of view.” This understanding can challenge comfort zones on all levels – and daily harassment can be a part of that. “Don’t ever compromise your dignity,” he says, “but try to understand what it is about the culture you’re in that makes these things happen.”
