From “Ghettoization” to a Field of Its Own: A Comprehensive Review of Street Harassment Research

Abstract

Street harassment represents one of the most pervasive forms of sexual violence. While it is commonly understood as a gender-based harm, it also intersects with racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and other forms of abuse. Although it is rarely responded to through government policy, research illustrates that street harassment can have profoundly negative impacts of those who experience it. This article provides a comprehensive review of the current “state of the field” of street harassment research. We undertook two extensive searches of the EBSCO Discovery database in 2015 and 2020, followed by the use of reference snowballing and a Google Scholar search in order to triangulate results. Studies included in the sample were published in English, peer-reviewed and centrally focused on street harassment. Dissertations and nongovernmental organization reports were also included due to the small number of studies in this field. One hundred eighty-two sources were included in the final sample. Findings show that publications on this topic have increased substantially across the two reviews. We provide a thematic overview of key research findings to date and argue throughout that current research suffers from conceptual and typological slippage and does not consistently take into account the need for an intersectional analysis. We close with suggestions for future directions in research and practice, given the emergent nature of the field.

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

“…Rather than ‘harassment’, Vera-Gray (2016) argues we should focus on men’s intrusions, an approach that expands the scope of what ‘counts’ to include more subtle experiences, including those that might not be labelled as ‘harassment’. What ‘counts’ as street harassment is also highly subjective and context-dependent, making it difficult to capture experiences through simplistic typologies of behaviour (Fairchild, 2010; Fileborn and O’Neill, 2021; Fileborn and Vera-Gray, 2017).…”

“…While street harassment is often conceptualised as a form of sexual and gender-based violence (Fileborn and O’Neill, 2021), critical and intersectional contributions highlight how people of colour (Davis, 1994), LGBTQ+ communities (Fogg-Davis, 2006; Stop Street Harassment, 2014), religious minorities (Mason-Bish and Zempi, 2019), sex workers (Armstrong, 2016) and other marginalised groups experience unique forms of harassment based on their socio-structural location. This further unsettles and destabilises the boundaries of what is captured under the banner of ‘street harassment’.…”

“…Yet, such ‘precise values’ underplay the ontological and epistemological slipperiness of street harassment discussed earlier. The contextual and subjective nature of street harassment render the quantified abstraction of experiential data as inherently limited, as it glosses over the contextual specificities of lived experiences (Fileborn and O’Neill, 2021). In this sense, artwork depicting individual experiences of street harassment may in fact represent street harassment with greater precision than abstracted quantitative data allows.…”

From harassment to disappearance: Young women’s feelings of insecurity in public spaces

“…Women are more exposed to sexual crimes than males. The threat of sexual crime is a way of maintaining a woman’s subordinate status and controlling their behaviour in public spaces; it is a spatial manifestation of gender-based power relations [ 11 ]. The shadow of sexual assault hypothesis proposes that in women, the fear of sexual crimes such as rape increases the overall fear of crime [ 12 ].…”

“…The ambiguity of behaviours that are not overtly sexual, vulgar or hostile requires considering the context for their interpretation [ 27 ]. Subjectivity also influences the interpretation of forms of intrusion, such as sexual harassment, as well as myths or stereotypes [ 11 ]. Self-recognition of sexual harassment based on personal experience is associated with overrecognition, while using legal definitions is associated with underrecognition.…”