Street Harassment Research Articles

Whose line is it anyway: graphic anthology drawing the line as a counter to mainstream rape reportage in India

ABSTRACT Published by Delhi’s feminist press Zubaan Book and Toronto’s Ad Astra Comix, Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back is an anthology of graphic narratives by fourteen young women. The book came into being as a result of a workshop held in the wake of the brutal gang rape and murder of a young female medical student in Delhi in December 2012; the incident received extensive national and international media coverage and triggered massive civic protests across the country. The ensuing national conversation around rape was shaped in a significant manner by media reportage which ranged from fact-based reports of the night’s events to impassioned opinion pieces. However, as scholars like Deepa Fadnis and Shakuntala Rao have pointed out, the newsgathering and reporting process is heavily influenced by patriarchal socialisation; as a result, the conversation rarely moves beyond the language of surveillance and control of female bodies under the rhetoric of women’s safety. An anthology like Drawing the Line, I argue, offers a valuable counter-narrative to the problematic public discussion around rape. The anthology explores, in the black-and-white of newsprint and documentary photojournalism, a gamut of issues that undergird rape culture; these include punitive beauty standards, enforced heteronormativity, restrictions on mobility, lack of economic independence, street harassment etc. Equally importantly, the stories articulate a desire for what Shilpa Phadke calls the right to risk and pleasure. My paper, therefore, will explore this graphic anthology as an image-text archive that resists the hegemony of the mainstream discourse by significantly broadening its concerns and offering perspectives that interrogate the status quo’s espousal of the rhetoric of safety.

Online activism and street harassment: Critical cartographies, counter-mapping and spatial justice

Social media and activist sites have provided an avenue to contest the dominant framing of street harassment as “trivial” and have sought to make street harassment and its harms visible. To date, digital activism has been analysed and conceptualised in relation to its potential as a counter-public forum that enables collective action and resistance, political mobilisation, “speaking out” and consciousness raising, and as a site of informal or innovative justice. I aim to build on this literature by examining the potential for the activist sites Hollaback!, @catcallsofnyc and @dearcatcallers to function as a form of “counter-mapping”, contributing towards broader social justice efforts to disrupt and transform dominant productions of space/place. I examine the tensions created by these digital practices, particularly with regards to whether they disrupt the production of space/place or, rather, reinforce urban space as a gendered “threatscape”.

“It ain’t a compliment”: Feminist data visualisation and digital street harassment advocacy

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment ‘knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are ‘knowable’ via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists’ practices, we argue that what constitutes ‘data visualisation’ itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting ‘traditional’ practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications at the policy level.

Outline of a Linguistic Model for the Study of Emerging Naming

The article presents the outline of a linguistic model that is part of a methodology for identifying and analyzing emerging or referentially unstable namings, such as cultural appropriation, street harassment, climate refugee or ecocide. The model and the method are intended to guide the interpretation – manual or semi-automatic – of the referential expressions, according to the semantic-cognitive type of the designated entity (human entity, social process, event, etc.), but also taking into account interdiscursive negotiations that affect the choice of terms and their uses. The proposed approach is original and is based on several guiding ideas: (1) take into account the complexity of the naming and the entanglement of his different facets which are categorization, meaning, performativity and valuation (desirability, preferences, social norms), (2) target the development phase of the naming (observe how speakers deal with the unstable): for this purpose, we will use the notion of identification between weak or identified entities and strong or reference entities, (3) report in an integrated way the referential elaboration of knowledge, the lexical and semantic elaboration of expressions, and the expression of intersubjective attitudes. The scientific framework combines three main disciplinary areas: automatic language processing (construction and representation of knowledge, reference), semantics (elaboration of meanings) and discourse analysis (interdiscursive elaboration of concepts and terms).

Digital mapping as feminist method: critical reflections

Digital maps have been taken up as a productive tool in both activism and academic research. However, there has been less consideration of their use as a research method in qualitative social sciences research. This paper aims to contribute towards scholarship on qualitative research by providing a critical reflection on the use of digital mapping as a research method in a feminist research project on street-based harassment in Australia. Drawing on practices of reflexivity, as well as comments made by participants across 46 qualitative interviews, I consider how digital mapping can be used to facilitate feminist research, arguing that it represents a generative instrument which lends itself to the development of in-depth insights from participants. Yet, mapping also delimits the epistemological possibilities of qualitative research, and I consider how this method simultaneously constrains what can be known about street harassment.

Development of Street Harassment Scale for Women in Universities

This study is aimed to discuss the manifestations of street harassment among women university students of Lahore. The initial phase of the study involved conducting semi-structured interviews. For this purpose, 20 women university students were interviewed and 19 items were generated. A list of 19 items was given to experts to assess content validity. After removing repetitive statements, 15 item scale was retained and validated by experts. The final 15 item scale was administered to 150 female participants. Factor analysis showed significant KMO value and Bartlett’s test of sphericity which indicated a significant correlation between the items with a few exceptions of weak loadings. Items 12 and 13 showed weak loadings, so these items were discarded and a 13 item scale was retained. Three-factor solutions were suggested through Principle Component Analysis via oblimin rotation and labeled as Behavioral, Verbal, and Eve Teasing. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was further done on a sample of 380 participants to confirm the factors obtained via Exploratory Factor Analysis which overall showed a strong construct validity of the scale and model fit after removal of three items. The final retained version of the scale consisted of 12 items. To assess the convergent validity of the indigenously developed scale, the Sexual Harassment Experience Questionnaire (Kamal & Tariq, 1998) was used as it assessed a similar construct. The correlation coefficient of the two scales was .49 (p < .01). Cronbach alpha value of the developed scale was .82 suggesting a strong inter-item correlation. There are myriad interventions on which the study sheds light.

Runners’ experiences of street harassment in London

ABSTRACT Street harassment is a common everyday occurrence, yet little academic attention has been paid to how it affects those engaged in outdoor recreation. This study critically explores street harassment experienced and managed by runners in London. Data was collected through an online survey and one-to-one interviews. A total of 121 runners across 26 London boroughs completed the survey, with seven women and two men taking part in follow-up interviews. Transcripts and survey responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The survey results showed that 84% of women and 50% of men have experienced some form of street harassment while running in London. Five themes were identified: Running into Trouble, I am Afraid of Men, The Cost of Safety, Silencing Myself and It’s Not Me, It’s You. These themes illustrate the complexities contained in the experience of street harassment, the impact it has on runners and how they try to manage it. This study highlights a pressing need for a shift in cultural and political attitudes towards the issue of street harassment.

Direction of Regulating Catcall Actions in Law: Comparison of Indonesia and France Law

Various forms of harassment in the world are increasing, including in Indonesia. Women and children are the most frequent victims of sexual harassment, but it does not rule out that men can become victims. Catcalling is an act that has sexual implications for the victim with teasing, whistling, screaming, comments, and even eye contact on the street or in public places. Sexual harassment negatively impacts victims such as shame, offense, humiliation, anger, loss of self-esteem, loss of chastity, depression, etc. Writing this scientific article aims to provide reference material for lawmakers regarding the ideal regulation of street harassment, especially catcalling. Then, give the readers an understanding of catcalling and the urgency of its rule in Indonesian legislation. The research method used in this scientific article is a normative juridical method with data collection techniques using literature study by examining secondary data, namely statutory regulations, other legal documents, research results, assessment results, and other references. This study uses a statute approach, conceptual approach, and comparative approach. This verbal sexual harassment has been taken seriously in several countries, one of which is France. In France, this anti-catcalling Law is known as Loi Schiappa. Loi Schiappa gave direct fines to the perpetrators of catcalling. In Indonesia, there is no regulation regarding catcalling, resulting in a legal vacuum. Indonesia can follow the model of the French Catcalling arrangement, which uses direct fines on the spot. So that provides legal certainty as well as protects the human rights of victims of catcalling.

Does Verbal Street Harassment Signal Perpetrator Dominance to Male and Female Observers?

It is difficult to explain why verbal street harassment, where typically a male harasser yells sexually harassing statements at a female victim, has survived as a behaviour. We propose that verbal street harassment may signal a harasser’s dominance and aimed to test this in our registered report. Participants (N = 443) read one of two vignettes describing either a street harassment incident (in which a male perpetrator harasses a female victim) or a street incident without harassment. Participants were asked to evaluate whether the male target possessed a range of traits (including dominance) and to evaluate any harm the female target suffered from the incident. Results suggested that the male target who verbally harassed a female victim on the street was perceived by participants as more dominant and as having a darker personality than a male target who did not engage in street harassment. Participants also perceived the female target as more harmed when she was harassed. However, results did not support the predicted interaction of participant sex and incident type on participants’ perceptions of the male and female targets. These results suggest that verbal street harassment may signal a harasser’s dominance which may be why the behaviour has been maintained. To establish whether verbal street meets the conditions to be classed as a costly signal, these findings should be replicated and extended. Understanding why street harassment persists as a behaviour is critical to designing effective intervention to prevent street harassment and protect harassment victims.

Motivations behind catcalling: exploring men’s engagement in street harassment behaviour

ABSTRACT ‘Catcalling’ is a common form of street harassment, often described as sexual harassment from a stranger in a public place. In most cases, it involves a man intruding on a woman’s attention using words, whistles, sounds, or gestures, which essentially define the woman as a sexual object. The purpose of the present study was to explore men’s motivations for catcalling and to investigate the characteristics of men who catcall relative to those who do not. Male participants (N = 258) completed online survey measures of sexism, masculinity/femininity, social dominance, and attitudes towards sexual harassment. We also included a measure exploring motivations for catcalling and reactions that catcallers hope to elicit in their targets. The most frequently reported motivations for catcalling were to flirt with and to express sexual interest in the target, and the most desired reaction from recipients was friendliness. Further, men who reported having engaged in catcalling demonstrated higher levels of hostile sexism, self-ascribed masculinity, social dominance orientation, and tolerance of sexual harassment.

Mapping Activist Responses and Policy Advocacy for Street Harassment: Current Practice and Future Directions

This article presents findings from a comprehensive mapping exercise of activist responses to, and policy advocacy for, street harassment across the US, UK and Australia. Analysis of activist groups found that the bulk of responses constituted forms of “awareness raising” and documenting the experiences of victims, suggesting that current advocacy is largely situated within the “problem identification” phase of policy development. The extent and focus of activism and advocacy efforts varied across the three locations, with the responses advocated for shaped by local concerns and politics. In particular, activist groups diverged in their support for criminal justice responses to street harassment. Where policy and other initiatives have been developed, these have rarely been evaluated, and there is a clear need to establish an evidence base to better support future policy and practice developments.

When Girls Walk: Mobilities of and Resistance to Affective Atmospheres of Unwelcome

Developing a framework of “affective atmospheres of unwelcome” from the work of Locatora Radio and Anderson (2009), Stewart (2008), and Thompson (2017), I examine how affective build-up and circulation suffuse a space in an atmosphere, as the atmosphere is taken up and felt in the bodies of street harassed individuals. I engage women’s narratives, the 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and practices of resistance and “response-ability” (Rentschler, 2014) in headphone listening practices and an online antiharassment photojournalism series to assert that women’s and gender nonconforming individuals’ experiences of “affective atmospheres of unwelcome” disclose street harassment as a persistent and ordinary patriarchal structure that intrudes on women, gender nonconforming, and queer bodies in public space. This article makes known commonplace acts of resistance that street harassed individuals utilize to move through and transform atmospheres of unwelcome and demonstrates how affects are political and contingent implementations of a place and culture.

The ebb and flow of ‘eve-teasing’ in the news: Front page coverage of street harassment of women in Bangladesh

Eve-teasing is a euphemism for street-based sexual harassment, which is a widespread issue across Bangladesh affecting the emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing of Bangladeshi women. The media can play a vital role by covering news and raising awareness of eve-teasing. Historically, the headlines in Bangladesh focused on more obvert forms of gender violence—rape, murder, acid attacks—framing eve-teasing as a mere nuisance, a fact of life in the country. How the media portrays eve-teasing in Bangladesh is a subject about which there is currently very little research. This content analysis of the two main national newspapers in Bangladesh assesses how the media reported street-based sexual harassment over the course of a seminal year—2010. It was during this year that the government of Bangladesh enacted the Family Violence Prevention and Protection Act in acknowledgement of the prevalence and seriousness of gender violence in the country. Similar acts had been passed by the governments of nearby countries India and Sri Lanka in 2005, and Nepal in 2008 (Fardosh, 2013). This study looks at how Bangladeshi newspapers covered ‘eve-teasing’ prominently (as front-page news), in a year when it was acknowledged as a serious issue, through the passing of a law by the Bangladeshi government.

Street harassment and social control of young Muslim women in Brussels: destabilising the public/private binary

While some research has been undertaken in recent decades into sexual violence against women in public space, the same cannot be said about everyday, ‘mild’ forms of harassment. From field research in Brussels between 2013 and 2016 with young people, the majority of whom have a (Muslim) migration background, we can conclude that physical violence happens only rarely and that the fear experienced by these young women relates to a more general, ambient state of vigilance, which relates to feeling out of place; public space remains a predominantly masculine domain. One of the main findings of the study is that ‘mild’ forms of harassment are used as a strategy of social control by men hanging out and that young women apply defence tactics to protect themselves against the perceived dangers in the public domain. Street harassment is embedded in dual affective dynamics, which generates feelings of belonging among young men and feelings of threat in young women. Here street harassment emerges as a mode of social control which ‘keeps them in their place’.

Disruption and Design: Crowdmapping Young Women’s Experience in Cities

The history of women’s exclusion and invisibility in cities is well charted, yet young women’s experience of sexual harassment and assault has been difficult to quantify. This article discusses the Free to Be project initiated by Plan International in 2018. In partnership with Monash University’s XYX Lab and CrowdSpot, the crowdmapping web app enabled young women in Delhi, Kampala, Lima, Madrid, and Sydney to identify and share their experiences of public spaces. It is believed to be the most ambitious global crowdsourced data collection project on street harassment ever undertaken. By using coding and visual data techniques, the data demonstrated the scale of the problem and the urgent need for city-level decision makers, as well as other members of society, to take action. This article outlines the findings from Free to Be, and explores the ways data and activism led by girls and young women are a powerful method for creating change.

Emotional embodiment to face street harassment during the practice of adventure activities in Mexico

ABSTRACT This paper explores the emotions experienced by two Mexican women as a consequence of street harassment episodes while practising adventure outdoor activities. Leisure and travel often place women in unfamiliar space and places increasing their perception of vulnerability, thus reducing their participation and enjoyment, and also affecting their physical patterns as well as their emotional responses. In order to analyse affectual embodiment and its impacts in the use of public adventure space through coping strategies I rely on Ahmed’s interpretations of anger, while Jiménez-Esquina’s ‘ambivalent fluxes’ and Hall’s ‘sentient and emotional body’ contribute to explore the emotion as a ‘continuum’ of embodied practices that shed light on Wilson and Little’s ‘geography of women’s travel fear’. The analysis indicates the relevance of emotions in the construction of inclusive adventure space in a context of violence and insecurity, as well as the role of socio-cultural influence on the ‘vulnerable women’ social construct.

SafeRoute

Recent studies show that 85% of women have changed their traveled routes to avoid harassment and assault. Despite this, current mapping tools do not empower users with information to take charge of their personal safety. We propose SafeRoute, a novel solution to the problem of navigating cities and avoiding street harassment and crime. Unlike other street navigation applications, SafeRoute introduces a new type of path generation via deep reinforcement learning. This enables us to successfully optimize for multi-criteria path-finding and incorporate representation learning within our framework. Our agent learns to pick favorable streets to create a safe and short path with a reward function that incorporates safety and efficiency. Given access to recent crime reports in many urban cities, we train our model for experiments in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. We test our model on areas of these cities, specifically the populated downtown regions with high foot traffic. We evaluate SafeRoute and successfully improve over state-of-the-art methods by up to 17% in local average distance from crimes while decreasing path length by up to 7%.

The legal rights of workers and volunteers at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Purpose Against the background of the biggest arts festival in the world, there have been some shocking findings recently about the treatment of performers and other workers at the Fringe. The purpose of this paper is to consider the type of treatment a significant number of Fringe workers experience and how it might be dealt with under the law. The mistreatment of workers includes being: required to work excessively long hours, paid low wages or no wages, subject to sexual or street harassment, lookism, ageism or deprivation of other employment rights. What is unusual about Fringe workers is they normally only work for a short time (often a maximum of two months). Also, in respect of performers and other theatre workers, they might be inclined to work on a voluntary, unpaid basis to gain the necessary experience to kickstart their careers. Employers will often be theatrical promoters in charge of productions at a number of venues. This paper highlights the issues surrounding working at the Fringe and identifies the employment law issues for its workers. This involves identifying likely breaches of legislation under the civil law and contract law by employers. Also, the consideration of how the criminal law could apply to the treatment of workers is undertaken. Finally, it involves an analysis of how the rights of Fringe workers could be better protected. The findings and recommendations in this paper will have application to any situation where someone is employed as a volunteer or worker in an artistic setting on a short-term basis. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a review of sources drawn from articles in law journals, newspapers, etc. Findings The findings of this paper suggest that there is a need for reform of the law. Research limitations/implications This paper focuses on improving the rights of Fringe workers who have a history of being neglected or abused. Practical implications This paper ensures improved rights for Fringe workers. Social implications This paper analyses issues that are relevant for all workers in the arts at festivals, etc., throughout the UK. Originality/value This paper is extremely original.

Street harassment is marketplace discrimination: The impact of street harassment on young female consumers’ marketplace experiences

This study brings street harassment to the retailing and consumer services literature streams. Street harassment describes unwanted interactions in public spaces between strangers or customers and is often motivated by a person’s gender, sexual orientation, or gender expression. To date, marketers have overlooked the occurrence of street harassment in retail establishments and consumer service domains, such as in theaters, public markets, recreational areas, and shopping malls. This work empirically demonstrates the extent to which young women in Nepal experience harassment from men in the marketplace and the various tactics they employ to lessen it. Furthermore, this research exposes the extent to which Nepali men admit to participating in verbal, physical, or visual harassment of women in various retailing and service settings. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical, managerial, and societal implications and encourages public policy officials to treat street harassment as a criminal offense.

Fear of cycling: Social, spatial, and temporal dimensions

Objective and perceived risk, danger, and safety concerns are often identified as barriers to taking up cycling. While a vast literature examines cycling safety, risk, and danger, little research examines relationships between fear and cycling, i.e. the emotional experience of risk, danger, and safety concerns. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring the fears reported by recent immigrants who are new cyclists in Toronto, Canada. Cyclists expressed many different types of fear; their fears were dynamic and possessed social, temporal, and spatial qualities. The two most frequent fears participants described were fear of injury and fear for personal safety. Fear of injury varied across the city and by time of day. It was also shaped by past cycling experiences, while appearing to attenuate with the accumulation of cycling skills. Fear of injury can also be social; and the primary focus herein is on how it can be gendered. For instance, gendered access to opportunities to cycle throughout the life course can shape cycling fear(s). Fear for personal safety was primarily expressed by women, was often shaped by past experiences of street harassment, and changed throughout the day, across the city, and was understood in relation to other places. Participants also described fears related to bicycle theft, getting lost, encountering mechanical problems, and getting in trouble with law enforcement.