Campus Safety Receives Frequent Reports of Catcalling
From groups of girls being yelled at while walking down Water St. to accounts of a white pickup truck harassing students on Front Street, Academy students have reported stories of slurs, names and catcalls hurled at them on the streets of Exeter.
“I’ve personally experienced catcalling in the town of Exeter but very rarely on the actual Exeter campus,” said senior Jacqueline Byrne. “Unfortunately, I think in Exeter it is somewhat of a common occurrence.”
“Usually it’s not anything particularly obscene but just people making rude and loud noises,” senior Milena DeGuerre said of the harassment. “It’s often a group of young guys with their friends. I’ll walk around town a few times a week and hear something.”
Senior Molly Canfield noted the feelings of discomfort or surprise that come from being harassed on the streets. “In my two years at Exeter, catcalling has always been an issue,” she said. “When walking to Lexie’s or D Squared [Java], it was always a bit shocking when you were catcalled.”
Canfield also mentioned that, from her personal experience, the severity and frequency of such harassment dramatically increased after President Trump’s election last November. “After the election, catcalling became a frequent occurrence,” she said. “The calls changed from creepy but harmless to shouts of genuine rage. Local men driving by in pickup trucks felt empowered.”
Campus Safety Officer Paul Gravel also noted that Campus Safety had observed a rise in the number of hostile encounters between Exonians and members of the town. Gravel attributed this increase to the fact that Court Street had just been closed off, leading to an increase in pedestrian traffic through Front Street. “Just last week I got four reports and two phone calls from Exeter residents about issues at crossroads,” said Gravel. The majority of such incidents simply stemmed from students not making eye contact with drivers. “There was an incident where a student crossed on a bicycle in front of traffic, and a driver barely missed him. The driver was very irritated.”
“If you break down someone’s humanity and self worth from the start eventually you’re left with someone who doesn’t feel comfortable saying no.”
Despite the frequency of such incidents, students often ignore or overlook the verbal harassment. “Sadly it’s just one of those things people accept,” Byrne said. “And it’s not only women who are harassed—while more frequently at night than in the day, I’ve been with guy friends who have slurs yelled at them.”
Gravel believed that catcalling and harassment are frequent occurrences in Exeter despite the small number of official reports made. “We have seen reports—and I would like to hear more of them come through—of obscenities being yelled from windows or racially-motivated verbal attacks. We document every one of those and send to Exeter Police Department(EPD),” he said.
Officer Bruce Page, the Problem-Oriented Police officer at the EPD, agreed with Gravel. “We welcome any reports,” he said. “We won’t tolerate them in this town–we want Exeter to be a safe place for everybody to live in.”
Page added that overall, Exeter has one of the lowest crime rates and most active police departments in the state. When reports are filed with Campus Safety, according to Gravel, the date and time of the incident, severity of the incident, and any information on the driver or the car is passed onto the EPD. Gravel noted that most reports are made either by faculty members or students’ advisors.
He also encouraged any students who have experienced harassment in Exeter to file reports with Campus Safety, adding that a report filed by two summer school students this past summer resulted in the arrest and charging of the harassers. “Everyone should report, even when there is not enough information,” he stressed. “We don’t know but the Police Department might keep track of other cases with similar descriptions, they can piece two and two together.”
Officer Page mentioned a previous incident of racist comments being made to an African American faculty member, who managed to get a description of the harasser. Page assisted the faculty member in tracking down the suspect, and when she declined to press charges, he hand-delivered a letter she wrote to the suspect. Additionally, after several complaints were made about a specific vehicle that repeatedly catcalled students, the EPD was able to make an arrest. The suspect was charged with disorderly conduct, which in New Hampshire can result in up to a $1,000 fine or a year in jail.
However, many Exeter students still felt that little could be done to prevent such instances from happening. “I think people have such good relationships and experiences with the locals of Exeter and with the people on campus that it is sometimes something that is overlooked,” said Byrne. “And people in general are catcalled pretty often, so it’s not something that everyone constantly discusses.”
Senior Ben Harrison, co-head of the Feminist Union, felt that there was little the school could do to address the issue of catcalling, even with students on campus. “The school can do mandatory meetings, but having something school-enforced doesn’t really grab the attention of people who need it,” he said. “The most effective thing would be just having groups of friends
talk about it.”
Given the fact that most reported incidents stem from people not a part of the Exeter community, Gravel acknowledged that Campus Safety also had difficulty ensuring total protection for the student body. Although he had recently increased Campus Safety patrolling at crossroads during peak times, because the Academy is “an open campus with major roads that run through,” Gravel said that it’s “virtually impossible” to track the people who come in and out.
Still, DeGuere–who is a co-head of Exonians Against Sexual Assault (EASA)–felt that catcalling and harassment are facets of an overall unhealthy culture, and are therefore worth addressing. “It’s those little things that happen everyday that we don’t think about that tip the scale, and it says something about the culture,” she said. “If you break down someone’s humanity and self worth from the start eventually you’re left with someone who doesn’t feel comfortable saying no.”
However, aside from raising student awareness, DeGuerre agreed that there was little concrete action the Academy could take. “Most Exonians would not catcall each other especially not on campus,” she said, “but we should still have more discussions about this and some of those discussions may end up back in the homes of people around town.”
In the same vein, Gravel noted that the best thing members of the Exeter community could do is to be aware. “We should get the message to students that catcalling does happen, and they need to be careful and courteous,” he said. Gravel also added that being mindful at crossroads would help, as some drivers might be in a stressful situation trying to commute to their destination in time. According to him, stopping, crossing as a group, waving and a little smile or a thank you can greatly deescalate the situation and improve relations between Academy students and Exeter drivers.
“I’m not saying that the fact that a driver sitting in traffic condones anything that he says, that’s just ignorant.” Gravel said. “But we can police ourselves to decrease the amount of negativity between interactions between students and people in town.”