Situating Legal Consciousness: Experiences and Attitudes of Ordinary Citizens about Law and Street Harassment

Abstract

The legal consciousness of ordinary citizens concerning offensive public speech is a phenomenon whose legal status has been vigorously debated, but which has received little empirical analysis. Drawing on observations in public spaces in three northern California communities and in-depth interviews with 100 subjects recruited from these public locations, I analyze variation across race and gender groups in experiences with offensive public speech and attitudes about how such speech should be dealt with by law. Among these respondents, white women and people of color are far more likely than white men to report being the targets of offensive public speech. However, white women and people of color are not significantly more likely than white men to favor its legal regulation. Respondents generally oppose the legal regulation of offensive public speech, but they employ different discourses to explain why. Subjects' own words suggest four relatively distinct paradigms that emphasize the First Amendment, autonomy, impracticality, and distrust of authority. Members of different racial and gender groups tend to use different discourses. These differences suggest that the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens is not a unitary phenomenon, but must be situated in relation to particular types of laws, particular social hierarchies, and the experiences of different groups with the law.

Above the Roof, Beneath the Law: Perceived Justice Behind Disruptive Tactics of Migrant Wage Claimants in China

“…Empirical findings from research on legal consciousness have generated insights for a wide array of groups and settings (e.g., Bumiller 1988;Engel 2005;Engel & Engel 2010;Ewick & Silbey 1998;Nielsen 2000). Nielsen (2000) analyses the perception of law on offensive speech in public places across different groups of American citizens.…”

“…Nielsen (2000) analyses the perception of law on offensive speech in public places across different groups of American citizens. She has not only conducted in-depth observations, but has also collected systematic data comparing gender, racial and ethnic groups.…”

“I Want to be Able to Walk the Street Without Fear”: Transforming Justice for Street Harassment

“…It is trivialised, under-reported, and often difficult to respond to through a conventional criminal justice paradigm (Bowman 1993;Laniya 2005;Nielsen 2000). This is true even in contexts where some of the practices comprising street harassment are covered under existing sexual offences or public order legislation, such as our own contexts of Australia and the United Kingdom.…”

Use of domestic violence services by Portuguese women in England

“…This means if they were not likely to seek help from support services for situations of domestic violence in their home country, they are also not likely to do so in the country of destination (Nielsen, 2000(Nielsen, , p. 1085Menjívar and Salcido, 2002, p. 903-11;Burman and Chantler, 2009, p. 71). This has been found to be the case in South Asian immigrants living in the UK (Anitha, 2008, p. 462, 472;Gill, 2004, p. 189), South American immigrants living in North America (Earner, 2010, p. 33;Vidales, 2010, p. 539) and also first generation Portuguese emigrants generally (RochaTrindade, 2006, p. 9).…”