Our board member Dr. Laura S. Logan, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hastings College, wrote “Street Harassment: Current and Promising Avenues for Researchers and Activists” for the current issue of the academic journal Sociology Compass. In it she makes the case for why researchers in particular need to focus on street harassment. A short exceprt follows, here is the full article.
“…researchers should focus on street harassment for several reasons…because it is on a continuum of violence against and oppression of femininities and the people associated with femininities. It is also on a continuum of violence against people of color, particularly when we consider institutional racism and the risks of criminalization associated with being in public space if one is, for instance, a Black man or woman. Street harassment is part of a larger culture that values in deed if not always in word men’s sexually predatory behaviors, sexual assault against women and children, women’s subordination and marginalization in politics, the second shift and the wage gap, victim blaming, the murder of transgender women, bashing gay men, repelling girls from math and science before they even get to high school, increasingly limited access to reproductive health care, racial profiling, and more. Research indicates that street harassment limits women’s presence in public space – where the work of politics and social change is most likely to take place – and that women think about harassment, fear it, and plan for it, even in its absence (Gardner 1995). Street harassment is more than a nuisance, more than a threat, more even that the violence that sometimes accompanies it….
Street harassment conveys the message that harassers are entitled to own public space and in a sense to control and violate the people in that space. The message to targets of street harassment is that they should hide, be afraid, pay attention to what potential street harassers want them to do, and wear and say and be. Street harassment robs people of safety, agency, power, and opportunity. Increasingly, activists are writing about and rallying together to address street harassment. It is time that more researchers joined them.”
