Morelia, Michoacán.- If you feel in danger or feel unsafe when traveling on a street or neighborhood, remember that you can visit one of the orange points here in Morelia; these are located in different areas and you can know them if you type in the search engine of your device “Orange IMPLAN dots”.
Remember that an Orange Dot is a safe space that will welcome women exposed to social violence and sexual harassment. Locations can be businesses, libraries, schools, gas stations, supermarkets, etc., which will be equipped with an informative guide that they will follow to provide support, as well as helpline numbers to contact the authorities.
We had the opportunity to chat with a worker who received a couple of trainings from Inmujeris staff at the site where she works, to learn from her experience, how to operate the help protocol in a situation where a woman may feel violated. Being the site visited a Bar-Restaurant named Joselo’s Burguer Pub, located in Colonia Ventura Puente, the interviewee told us the following:
Take note: if some men want to make drink invitations to women, they were told that they are forbidden to bring drinks given by others to a girl’s table because they don’t know if she wants to and that is harassment.
If a worker sees fights between couples or a man is drunk behaves arrogantly, you can approach the woman to ask if everything is in order at the table.
If a girl feels harassed, she can make a sign or approach the bar.
Do not judge, victimize or make less the concern of women, just ask if it is okay and what happened and then call an emergency number; Here, it depends on the girl’s state of shock.
Make the telephone line available to the woman.
Although the personal data of the aggressor is not taken, a physical description is made of him (as if it were a spoken portrait), so that he does not re-enter.
Finally, the bar worker mentioned that the way to identify that the business is an orange dot is a distinctive plaque on the façade of the premises, added to the fact of appearing in the sketch made by the IMPLAN where it officially shares what are the orange dots until this moment in Morelia; prior to this, a registration of the business had to be made in the program by going directly to the Inmujeris facilities.
Enriching the knowledge about how the workers of an establishment can operate in this type of situation, a hairdresser named Gato Poeta was also visited in the Ventura Puente neighborhood, where in addition to the aforementioned the owner of the premises shared that they have a WhatsApp group in which all the businesses called orange points participate, and serves to upload reports of conflict or shelter, as well as to urgently request the proximity of a police unit or some trusted vehicle unit to transfer the violated woman.
Although it is a project that touched port because the municipal government brought it, it is the citizens who are supporting it, and the reason is that “neighborhoods like the Ventura bridge are very dangerous and have already experienced some event of insecurity”; These are the words of both workers.
