Bullying at the Pine Street Inn

August 2, 2014

This morning, a female guest of the Pine Street Inn who started bullying me over the past week coughed at me right in front of a Pine Street Inn employee.

I went to the office a few minutes later to tell that employee that the guest had been bullying me for a while.  As soon as I said the word "bullying," the employee got an exasperated look on her face and said "You need to report it right when it happens."  I said "That's what I'm doing; she coughed at me right in front of you."  The employee denied that the harassment had happened.  She then said "Just stay away from each other."  I said "I'm not trying to be around her; she harasses me."  She said "I'll report it, but you need to stay away from each other or you'll both get barred."  I said "I'm not doing anything to her!"

It's not my fault that sexual harassment and other bullying are constant problems at the Pine Street Inn or anywhere else.  It's not my fault that I am a particular target of that bullying.  It's not my fault that another guest of the shelter decides to persistently bully me every week.  When I report the incidents to staff, no staffperson should automatically treat me as if I'm being a pest or am equally at fault with the bully.

The people about whom I talk to staff aren't the only guests of the shelter who sexually harass or otherwise try to bully me; they are the people who are particularly persistent and vicious with their bullying, and with whom there never seems to be any other interaction possible except for my being in my involuntary role of their target and their being in their chosen roles of antagonizers, even if I never approach them in any way at all.

Many people harass me at the shelter every day, whenever they feel like it.  It's not unusual for someone to be friendly toward me and then rub her nose or cough at me an hour later or the next day, because she's in a bad mood, feels spiteful or feels like taking out her life's frustrations on someone.  If I went to staff every time a guest of the shelter harassed me or was otherwise nasty to me for no reason, I'd be in the office all day and at various hours of every night.

In addition to putting every woman in the world at the dubious mercy of every man, the conglomerate's tyrannical war on women has created several new ways for women to be nasty to other women.  That women who make use of those inappropriately aggressive, degrading behaviors toward other women are degrading themselves and eroding their own freedoms never seems to occur to the female bullies; their ignorance or denial of the significance of their behavior doesn't lessen the negative effects of the bullying on their targets.

Also this morning; a staffperson walked into the building wearing a grey t-shirt with three, large letters written on the front of it.  The last two letters are "GK," and the first letter is something that has a star in the middle of it.

I am not a pornography star.  I am a victim of voyeurism.  Nothing could ever have caused me to consent to the videos that have been filmed of me; there is no amount of money that anyone could have ever offered me to consent to that filming, and there's nothing that anyone can say about it that makes it something other than sexual assault.  There is nothing flattering about being the victim of sexual assault, and all attempts to pretend that there is are further degradations of and insults to the victim.


Copyright L. Kochman, August 2, 2014 @ 9:57 a.m.