Madison Ford, Texas, USA, Blog Correspondent
Talking about street harassment with people who aren’t familiar with the issue can often be frustrating, especially when not knowing leads to not believing that it’s a serious problem. Writing my honors thesis on street harassment has led to this type of interaction more times than I can count. When I speak with somebody who believes street harassment isn’t a big problem, my imperfect solution is to turn to the research.
Why is this imperfect? Well, studies all have some flaws and limitations. Science can never be 100% certain, and social science is often beneath the proverbial microscope rather than looking through it. Some people don’t trust statistics and cling to anecdotes that support their own worldview. I believe everyone is guilty of this, even the researchers who try very hard to avoid it. The point is, nothing is ever perfect or certain. That’s why continuing to study street harassment is integral to the fight against it: the more research we have about its prevalence, how it affects victims, and the mechanisms involved in changing the way women navigate public space, the more scientific evidence illuminates the realities of harassment.
Here are some of the things we know about street harassment, in addition to its prevalence, thanks to the blood, sweat, and tears of researchers.
1. All kinds of street harassment have negative effects on women.
In Dr. Harmon B. Sullivan’s 2011 study, women were separated into two groups. One group watched a video of a woman being harassed on the street and the other watched a scene on a street with no harassment. In the experimental group, women who had experienced more street harassment themselves reported more negative feelings than those who experienced less harassment. This held true for women who mostly experienced hostile or threatening harassment and for women who experienced mostly “benign” harassment. This goes to show that “compliments” or “just saying hi” are not as innocent as they seem to be.
Rachel H. Pain’s 1997 study shows how different types of harassment may lead to fear of sexual attack. More than 20% of respondents reported that unwanted sexual comments or being leered at made them fear sexual attack. Forty-two percent of respondents indicated that being touched up made them fear sexual attack and almost 50% reported that being flashed at incited that fear. Finally, a whopping 85% of women who report being followed in public say that this makes them fear sexual attack. Less intense types of street harassment show corresponding lower levels of fear, but fear remains nonetheless.
A study released in late 2014 conducted by researchers at the University of Mary Washington found that sexual harassment is traumatizing for women, especially for those who have experienced sexual abuse.
2. Street harassment and fear of rape are highly correlated across multiple studies.
Street harassment is an active factor in preventing women from going out in public on their own. Cynthia Grant Bowman refers to this pattern as the informal ghettoization of women in her legal article “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women,” and that if women are going to continue fighting for social equality, they must be able to leave their homes without crippling fear. In her book Back Off! How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers Martha Langelan wrote that for women, an underlying tension is always wondering how far the harasser will go, if he will become violent.
More recently, in early 2015 researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City released a study showing that the treatment of women as sexual objects – including through street harassment – contribute to increased feelings of anxiety about their physical safety, causing them to fear both physical and sexual harm.
3. Stranger harassment can be more damaging than harassment from people the victim knows, and the consequences could be dangerous.
In a 2000 study of Canadian women, findings suggested that women’s perceptions of safety were vastly influenced by their experiences of stranger harassment. While non-stranger harassment had very little effect on perceptions of safety, for each additional type of stranger harassment experienced, the odds of feeling safe decreased by 17-23%.
Knowing this, it makes sense that Pain’s 1997 study also discovered that women are almost twice as fearful of sexual attack from strangers than non-strangers despite the fact that “86.1% of women who have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking during their lifetime reported that the perpetrator was a current intimate partner at the time when the violence first occurred.” Street harassment directs women’s fear of rape towards people who may very well not assault them and confuses an already messy discussion about sexual assault.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the things we know about street harassment. Social scientists continue to search for answers and anti-street harassment organizations are conducting surveys of their own. If you’re committed to the fight against street harassment, take a look at these studies – or even better, start your own research project! Distribute a survey to your peers, coworkers, or friends and find out how street harassment affects the people around you. Then in your discussions about street harassment, you’ll have the tools to keep everyone informed.
Madison is a soon-to-be graduate of the University of Texas at Austin studying literature and sociology. Follow her on Twitter, @madiford222.
