Hannah Rose Johnson, Arizona, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

This month I talked with Pat Farr, a member of Hey Baby! Collective, in Tucson, AZ, about the intersections of sexual violence that are embedded in societal institutions; the sort of intersections that are more complex to organize around—specifically how profiling by police and police brutality constitute street harassment.

Farr presented an analysis of the nuances, scopes and the limits of perfect-victim narratives. When we think of street harassment solely as a cat-calling, where is power moving, what identity is created and who is being left out?

Farr says, “…rape culture is really a complex system that creates a framework for identifying who is a victim and who is a perpetrator. And if someone doesn’t fit into these tropes of victim/perp then it they fall outside of the discourse and are not victims and not perpetrators. So I like the term perfect and imperfect victim…[…] With street harassment it’s even more difficult. There’s very few protections against street harassment to begin with. So this notion of a perfect victim becomes subjectively very difficult to define.”

The first is the Office on Violence Against Women’s definition of sexual assault, which is defined as: any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs by force or without consent of the recipient of the unwanted sexual activity. Farr says that “The definition of sexual assault by the OVW includes street harassment.”

The second is the Center for Disease and Control’s uniform surveillance on sexual violence, which extends to noncontact unwanted sexual experiences. “This,” says Farr, “is very similar to non-consensual behavior of a sexual nature as described by the OVW.”

The third is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s definition of sexual harassment which includes offensive remarks about a person’s sex. The EEOC goes on to define sex-based discrimination as: discrimination against an individual because of gender identity, including transgender status, or because of sexual orientation. “As such,” Farr argues that “because sexual harassment is a form of sexual discrimination, according to the EEOC, harassment based on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination.”

“This gives us the opportunity to extend the definition of street harassment,” Farr says, “according to these definitions, it is street harassment when a transgender woman walking down the street is attacked because of her gender identity, and hence this would count as sexual violence.”

Farr brought up the case of Monica Jones—a black transwoman, sex worker rights activist and MSW student in Phoenix, AZ. She was arrested after a demonstration for sex workers when she took a ride from an undercover, and refused the driver’s proposition. Farr told me that “even though she refused the driver’s propositions, she was still arrested on the prostitution related crime against morality, manifestation of prostitution.” This kind of law, within the city municipal code crimes against morality, is known as “manifestation of prostitution.” It’s a kind of profiling law when a police officer thinks someone looks like a sex worker and is doing something in an area where sex workers would be.

“…it’s essential to recognize that people of color, lower class people, LGBQ people, transgender people, and HIV positive people all are at greater risk of police violence that’s based largely on culturally defined stereotypes of sexuality,” Farr states, “Compulsive heterosexuality, heteronormativity, white supremacy, neoliberal economics, and the prison industrial complex are all bound up with street harassment as a form of institutional violence against particular identities.”

Identities in the margins present different relationships to power which are reinforced through all of our state-sanctioned systems. These identities—these people and their lives—are vulnerable in the face of systems that reproduce heterosexuality, white supremacy, patriarchy and transphobia. These systems rely on exclusion and violence to function, and create our cultural understanding of who is a victim and what terms make a victim.

What Farr is saying here gives us a wider framework to think about who is a victim of street harassment. It is no longer only the person walking down the street being cat-called, it’s also person being profiled by police and arrested because of their gender identity and race.

This allows us to see police violence as a form of street harassment that is inevitably tied to the state.