Reflections on (mapping) street harassment

As someone who works within feminist and queer paradigms, it is important to be reflexive, transparent, and reciprocal in my research practices. This blog post is an attempt to live these principles.

Participants in this project were asked to complete an online mapping exercise before we met to conduct an interview discussing their experiences of public harassment and perceptions of justice. As a way of being reflexive and reciprocal, I completed my own Google map documenting my experiences of street harassment and reflect on my experiences (and reasons for doing this) here.

Feminist researchers have long argued for the importance of locating ourselves within our research projects. Scholars such as Sandra Harding suggest that this can act as a form of strong objectivity and accountability – it allows our readers to understand how we are situated within the world, and the ways in which this might shape our research practices and the types of claims we make from our data.

So, who am I?

I’m a 36-year-old academic lecturer and researcher living in Melbourne (Naarm) on the unceded lands of the Wirundjeri people. While the way I think about my gender identity resonates most with being ‘genderqueer’, I ostensibly move through the world as a white, cis-gender, able-bodied woman in a long-term heterosexual relationship. Although some aspects of my identity are more complex than these terms suggest, I nonetheless have a considerable amount of privilege.

Importantly, I have uncountable experiences of street harassment across my life. As a result, I do not approach this topic from some ‘neutral’ or disinterested position. Rather, this is something I have lived, and that continues to shape my identity, behaviour, and sense of safety on a daily basis.

Completing my own Google map that lays bear some of my experiences was one way of being transparent as to how I am situated in relation to street harassment. It makes visible what I have experienced (at least to some extent), but perhaps equally importantly what I have not experienced on account of my relative privilege.

I also view this as a form of reciprocity with participants – a way of ‘giving back’ and sharing, and of letting others know they are not alone. Sharing my experiences is intended as an act of consciousness-raising and solidarity.

However, I want to stress that this does not imply that feminist and queer researchers are somehow obliged to disclose our own experiences or perform our trauma publicly for others. There are many forms of reciprocity and giving back to participants. Sharing our own experiences is only one example, and it is not always appropriate, desirable, or possible for researchers to disclose their own experiences.

In this case, I felt comfortable and able to document my own experiences and share them openly with others. Again, this is in many respects a function of my privilege and being positioned in a way that enables me to ‘speak out’ and be heard and believed by others. Likewise, in the scheme of things, my experiences of street harassment have not been particularly traumatic (though this is not to say they have not been harmful), and it was not emotionally difficult for me to document my experiences. For others (and for other forms of violence) this might not be the case. 

Making my map

Another reason I decided to complete my own map was that it provided insight into what it was like to participate in aspects of this research project. Doing this exercise helped to illuminate the benefits and limitations of the method – what can mapping ‘tell’ us about experiences of harassment? Conversely, what does it obscure or render unknowable?

One of the first things I noticed was how completing the map was ‘generative’. Once I started mapping my experiences, this prompted my memory about incidents I’d long forgotten about. However, I was also acutely aware of experiences that I knew I’d had but could not remember the specific location or details of what had happened in order to pinpoint them on a map. Likewise, the static nature of Google maps made it impossible to represent experiences that occurred across space – encounters that traversed many kilometres were reduced to singular points on a page.

While I cannot claim that the experience of completing my own map was the same as (or similar to) that of my participants, it was nonetheless productive in understanding what this method ‘does’ in the process of making experiences of street harassment ‘knowable’.

Experiencing street harassment

I want to move on now to reflect on my experiences of street harassment, and my understandings of justice in relation to street harassment. My discussion here loosely follows the questions posed to interview participants in the project. You can view the incidents that I refer to here on my Google map.

All of my experiences of harassment have been as a cis-gender, heterosexual woman (though, as noted above, my gender identity is more complicated than this, I am read by others and move through the world in this way and identified as a cis-woman during most of the experiences that I’ve mapped). The vast majority of the harassment I have experienced has been sexual/sexist in nature, and I have never experienced harassment on the basis of my perceived sexuality, non-cis gender identity, race, disability and so on.

Like so many others, I was very young when I first experienced harassment – around 10 years old. My experiences have fluctuated over time in terms of how frequently I encountered harassment, with no seeming pattern during my adolescence and early adulthood. Sometimes, I went many months without being harassed, only to have several incidents occur over the course of a few days.

As I’ve gotten older, I encounter much less harassment, though it still happens infrequently. With a few notable exceptions, all of this harassment has been perpetrated by men (who I assume were cis-gender and heterosexual). These experiences have ranged from the mundane (horn honking, shouting from car windows), to the amusing, to the downright terrifying (being followed, indecently assaulted).

How have these experiences impacted on me over time? They have fostered a wariness and strong distrust of strange men – I am loathe to interact with men I don’t know in public spaces, and have perfected my ‘resting bitch face’. That said, I have also very consciously tried to resist how it has impacted my behaviour and use of public space. When I was younger, I would purposefully walk home alone late at night as a form of resistance. But this was, and still is, terrifying. I also have a tendency to placate men in public when I don’t feel like it’s safe to openly call them out or ignore them.

During the incidents themselves, the impacts have ranged from nothing to feeling anxious, fearful, and angry. As I’ve gotten older, it’s the imposition on my time and space – the entitlement someone has to impose themselves on me, uninvited – that makes me furious and resentful. I have no doubt that these experiences have shaped me in ways that I’m not consciously aware of.

I struggle to think of a time that someone else has stepped in to help as a bystander. Most of the things I’ve experienced occurred when no one else was around or were done in a way that would not obviously look like harassment to an onlooker. I’ve stepped in as a bystander on a few occasions, though there have also been times where I should have intervened and didn’t, and this weights heavily on my mind.

Achieving justice?

So, how might we achieve some sense of ‘justice’ (broadly defined) in response to these types of experiences?

Numerous jurisdictions around the world have introduced criminal legislation and penalties – such as on-the-spot fines – for various iterations of street harassment. UK-based activist group Our Streets Now are currently agitating for similar legislation to be implemented. However, I’m sceptical that a criminal justice approach is likely to be an effective one in responding to street harassment (something I’ll write more on at a later point. It’s complicated, and not something I can do justice to - pun intended - here). I do acknowledge though that for some people I’ve spoken to, being able to report to the police and have a perpetrator receive punishment has been important in achieving justice.

For me, justice would require a transformation of the conditions that allow street harassment to happen in the first place. This is not necessarily something the criminal justice system can achieve. Arguably, the criminal justice system often reinforces, rather than challenges, these conditions. I want a world where I don’t have to map my experiences of street harassment, not one where perpetrators are punished after the fact to little effect.

To be clear, saying that I do not desire a criminal justice response is not the same as saying that individual perpetrators should not be held to account for their actions. To the contrary, this is an essential part of generating transformative change.

How we go about achieving this transformation is another question, and one that is unlikely to be easily resolved. Like all social and structural change, it will probably require decades of slow, difficult, contested and non-linear change. Much of this work has already begun, as illustrated through global feminist, queer and race-based activism (such as Black Lives Matter). My hope is that findings from this project can make one, small contribution to these efforts.