Who raised you?
Image by Bianca Berg
If anyone has ever worked on the street, you'll know how common it is to be met with rudeness or abusive comments. Doing jobs like flyering or promotion where you have to stop passers-by to give them things or explain a service on offer, you're bound to encounter some unsavoury comments and characters.
Walking past someone in the street is so brief, there is no accountability. The moment is so fleeting it’s enough to make the passer-by completely anonymous. If you ever wanted to hurl abuse, to unleash some pent up opinion or to release bubbling anger from something completely external, passing someone working on the street would be a pretty good opportunity to do so.
Part of my job at the moment is to hand out free covid home test kits on the high street. Given its to do with the pandemic, you do get met with the general spectrum of anti lockdowners, anti vaxxers or people who don't believe in covid at all. I even had one woman say "no thanks, I'm not a sheep!" when I offered a kit to her. Confusing - definitely. Offensive? Not at all.
Odd comments like these don't phase me. You expect it with the job and you learn to brush them off like they're nothing, because they are.
But occasionally there's a comment which hits differently, something that isn't funny in any way, stays with me and makes me feel sensitive and hurt. One of these happened the other day.
A teenage boy, who looked around 16 years old, was walking with an older man I presume to be his dad, or at least his guardian for the day. I offered them the kits and the boy said "go fuck yourself". The older man laughed.
It wasn't the fact the boy had said the words he did, or the fact he was smirking as he said them. It wasn't that he didn't break eye contact with me as he went to sit down nearby, unashamed to continue to be near the person he just harassed. Even though he seemed so proud, enjoying these feelings of power and dominance in making me uncomfortable while just trying to do my job, it wasn't him that bothered me.
He is just a kid. Minutes of staring and smirking wouldn't have measured to the snort of laughter from the older man.
Making someone laugh is a really validating feeling. Everyone wants to be funny, right? The boy would probably have felt good after that and think he would do something similar again. So I was angry at the man for validating this behaviour, encouraging disrespect from the kid he is meant to be raising.
And it made me think, if that is what his father, guardian or role model is endorsing in public, what could possibly be going on inside the home? What more is going on behind closed doors? If he can so confidently speak to a woman in the street like this now, how will he grow up to treat the women in his own life?
It only requires a very basic level of respect to not harass someone in the street, yet this respect is clearly not being taught.
These learned behaviours start from a young age. Most often, they start in the home. I would presume that in order to have the gumption to say what he said, with such an air of confidence, far worse comments have been cheered on in private. Probably by older men in his life, the men who should be responsible for being that role model figure, instilling good values and teaching how to navigate the world in a positive way.
So I’m left with a lingering thought. This young man, maybe he's never going to respect any woman, or any person, because no one is teaching him how to. People respect people because they are shown it. It’s a learned thing. Teenage years are so impressionable. You mimic how others act and you know what you can get away with. If disrespect is endorsed by the people you look up to, it’s difficult to override this with anything different.
I could never imagine saying “go fuck yourself” to a stranger on the street and if I said it in front of my parent they’d be completely appalled. I hope that I’m wrong. That this boy and other young people have kind and tolerant role models at home teaching them how to treat people. I hope this was out of character, just showing off. I really hope this wasn’t his dad.
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