Story highlights Paul Callan: Women who walk down the street know the humiliating catcalls of men who don't get that it's demeaning

He says in her assault case, Taylor Swift is delivering a message to men everywhere: "Get your groping hands off us"

Paul Callan is a CNN legal analyst, a former New York homicide prosecutor and currently is of counsel at the New York law firm of Edelman & Edelman PC, focusing on wrongful conviction and civil rights cases. Follow him on Twitter @paulcallan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) Upon leaving CNN studios in New York around lunchtime Wednesday after a busy few days providing on-air commentary on White House stories, I found myself walking behind a professionally attired young woman on 57th Street.

As New Yorkers know, that street, known as "Billionaire's Row," is now lined with construction sites and crowded with construction workers as a colossal wall of skyscrapers is added to Manhattan's skyline.

Traversing such sites is a routine part of life for pedestrians in the city. Males rarely think about it. For women it presents a very different situation. They would not be surprised by the catcalls the young woman in front of me had to endure. She handled the situation with aplomb, never turning her head, and pretending not to hear the calls and whistles, but I imagine her stomach must have been churning.

One would think that particularly in liberal and "progressive" Manhattan this sort of offensive and demeaning behavior would no longer exist. But this is not reality for women in America and in much of the world.

Which brings us to Taylor Swift, who took the witness stand Thursday in her assault and battery case against Denver DJ David Mueller, who, she alleges in a complaint, reached under her skirt and grabbed her buttocks before a concert at Denver's Pepsi Center in June 2013.

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