Chapter III: Perceptions of and
Responses to Street Harassment

[Note: only the text on perceptions is up, not responses. 5-14-08]

Women’s perceptions of street harassment vary greatly.  Factors like whether or not they take on a “traditional” or “feminist” framework, how often they are harassed, the severity of the harassment, the race, class and age of the harasser compared to themselves, and issues of fear and safety all play a role in how women feel about and classify the harassment they receive.  Gardner, Heben, and Nielsen’s examinations of women’s perception of street harassment and my own data relating to women’s perceptions follow. 

Mixed Advice: Women receive mixed advice on how to view the comments and actions by men toward them in public: the men are complimenting them and/or the men are to be feared.  In her thorough study of street harassment, Carol Gardner Brooks found in her study on street harassment that for decades the street harassment of women has been framed in a heterosexual romanticized framework.  She found that traditional advice and etiquette directed at women since at least the 1800s has usually counseled women to “gratefully accept or purposefully to ignore verbal and nonverbal harassment in general.” ¹  In one of her examples, Gardner cites a Glamour magazine test from 1969 that asked “Do You Act Like a Beauty?”  The test asks: “You’re walking along the street and a workman whistles appreciatively at you. You: a) ignore him b) tell him he’s being fresh c) call a cop d) smile in friendly acknowledgment and keep walking.”  Glamour’s correct answer was d ² because a beautiful woman is polite and gracious no matter what.  Yet at the same time, concerned parents and teachers, advice manuals, women’s magazines and the news warn women how dangerous the public sphere is for them and how they should subsequently act: do not go out in public (such as at night or alone), draw as little attention to oneself as possible, and look attractive but not attractive enough to draw extra attention to oneself. ³ Thus this advice places the responsibility for her safety in her hands and places the blame for harassment on her if she does not heed the advice (or even if she does).  The news media plays a large role in reinforcing women’s vulnerability in public by making stories about the abduction, rape, and/or killing of young women, particularly by strangers, the headline news.  Just in the past 24 hours of this writing, two different stories about the abduction of girls, one of whom was also murdered, each made the top news spot on www.cnn.com. ⁴  Thus, women are faced with conflicting advice and have often internalized conflicting perceptions of street harassment.
At least twenty of the 706 people who posted on the anti-street harassment Web site mentioned receiving conflicting advice on how to handle street harassment.  Eleven reported that either their own friends said they were lucky to receive men’s compliments or their mothers/other older women told them they were lucky men still paid them attention and that they should be flattered by the attention because it would not last.  Around ten other people reported that they had been told by friends, family members, boyfriends, and one woman’s psychotherapist that it was their fault they were harassed because of what they were wearing or for being out alone at night or “what did they expect” because they were so pretty.  These people’s postings reflect the mixed advice given to girls and women: the harassment is complimentary but the public sphere is dangerous and women are to blame if they are harassed because they must not have taken the proper precautions to prevent it.

Traditionalist Framework: Gardner found during her interviews of over 500 people in Indianapolis that many women and men (she did not indicate how many) had internalized the mindset that street harassment is complimentary to women and should be treated as such.  Also, they internalized that these kinds of “compliments” were legitimate ways for men and women to meet and eventually date.⁵   Some women suggested that harassment was men’s way to demonstrate their manliness and that if a man did not harass them, he must be gay. ⁶  Likewise, some women said that “men’s nature” caused them to have such a strong sex-drive that they had to look at every woman, even strangers, as potential sex partners. ⁷  Many traditionalist women felt that street harassment was an insult to their husbands or families, not to themselves, because if they were wearing a wedding ring or walking with a child, harassers should know they were “unavailable” and leave them alone. ⁸

Compared to women who saw harassment through a feminist or political lens, Gardner found that traditionalist women were much more likely to blame themselves for the harassment they received saying they provoked the harassment by the clothes they wore, by smiling and making eye contact, looking too shy or vulnerable, acting too polite, or by simply being attractive.⁹   One woman even said that “men could not be blamed for treating those they assumed to be sluts like sluts.”¹⁰   Similarly Heben found in her study of street harassment that some women say they enjoy being whistled at or commented on by men on the street because they feel that this kind of harassment is a response to their attractiveness and is complimentary.¹¹   In studying whether or not people supported the regulation of offensive public speech, Nielsen found that people generally understood that there is no permissible reason for racially-charged speech, but some people argued that sexual banter on the street may lead to a romantic relationship and so men should be allowed to “pick up” women on the street.¹²  

In my study, nearly no one had a traditionalist framework.  This is probably in great part because the anti-street harassment Web sites and the Street Harassment Summit were all created within a feminist framework, so the participants and facilitators I studied were likely to have a feminist framework too.  No Web site poster or facilitator or participant at the Street Harassment Summit workshop talked about street harassment as complimentary or something they enjoyed.  Two or three people who wrote on the Web sites noted they used to feel that the harassment was complimentary but as it continued or after they experienced a particularly insulting or scary incident, they no longer did.  Only one person in my survey reported in the open ended questions that s/he felt comments/touches from strangers on the street were complimentary. 

Feminist Framework: In Gardner’s study, women who had a feminist or political framework when discussing street harassment tended to view the harassment as similar to the sexual harassment women experience in school and the workplace and thus unacceptable. ¹³  They likewise saw violence in the street on a continuum with violence women experience in the home and that street harassment was related to rape because it could be a possible precursor to rape or because it felt like verbal rape.¹⁴   Most of these women did not accept responsibility for, as one woman interviewed phrased it, “being the victim of someone’s vulgar remark or actions.”¹⁵   However, Gardner found that no matter how outspoken a woman was of public harassment as harmful to women, she frequently “fell back on criticizing her own appearance or behavior as culpable – tactic admission that romantic attraction was at the root of public harassment by men” ¹⁶ and reflecting how engrained in women’s heads it is that men’s attention on the street is complimentary. 

Nielsen’s study of street harassment in Northern California showed how many women view harassment as a serious problem.  Fifty-five percent of the women Nielsen interviewed reported feeling that sexually suggestive comments from strangers in public places is personally a problem for them, citing reasons like feeling the remarks are threatening or degrading.¹⁷   Likewise, 78 percent of the women reported that sexually suggestive comments constitute a social problem.  They often connected the speech to “broader systems of gender hierarchy in society.  They see this kind of speech as an aspect of a larger social problem.”¹⁸  
All of the people who posted comments on the anti-street harassment Web sites took on a feminist framework against street harassment as did the facilitators of the anti-street harassment Web sites that I interviewed.  In Table 4 are some of the most frequent types of commentary that people wrote on the sites that directly reflected a feminist framework regarding street harassment: ¹⁹

Everyone except one person who took my online survey discussed street harassment in the open-ended questions from a feminist perspective as a negative occurrence.  The workshop I attended at the Street Harassment Summit was within a feminist framework viewing street harassment as bad for women and no one in attendance vocalized any commentary that it was otherwise.

One of the questions I asked of the facilitator of the anti-street harassment Web sites was why they started their individual Web site and their answers reflected a feminist framework view of street harassment.  The facilitator of the HollaBack Chicago site said that she knew there were HollaBack sites in many major U.S. cities but when she had a particularly bad street harassment experience and wanted to report/share it, she found there was not a site for the Chicago area and thus decided to start one.  She said her goal now in running the site is to start conversations on street harassment and create a community around people who experience street harassment.²⁰   The facilitator of the HollaBack San Francisco site said she was “amazed at the brilliance of the idea to give women the space to empower themselves against this daily occurrence” of street harassment.  Inspired by HollaBack NYC, she decided to create a place for women in San Francisco to post their responses to their experiences in public spaces.  Her particular goal in running the site is to raise people’s awareness of the problem of street harassment for women and prompt discussion. ²¹  The facilitator of HollaBack Boston started the site as a way to talk to people about street harassment and provide a place for Bostonians to document and dissect street harassment problems unique to Boston on a site just for them.  She also started a companion site called HollaBackTALK where she and co-facilitators provide a more academic and intellectual analysis and discussion of street harassment, from a feminist perspective.²²    

Circumstances of Harassment: Even though many women Gardner interviewed saw nothing wrong with street harassment if it seemed complimentary, every woman she interviewed had practiced at least one strategy to avoid or handle the street harassment, showing that at least some of the time, even the women who claim the harassment is complimentary do not like, enjoy, or appreciate strange men’s attention. 

Heben found that usually women’s perception of harassment greatly depended on the severity of the harassment they received.  More women were able to explain or romanticize harassment acts such as staring or whistling than they could harassment acts of being touched, grabbed, or followed.²³   Heben found that in addition to the severity, a woman’s sexual orientation, race or class, as well as those of her harasser’s, influenced whether or not she felt she had been paid a compliment or had been harassed by a man on the street.²⁴   Race can play an important role in street harassment; for example a black woman who is told she is looking sexy by a white male may feel more harassed and violated than if the speaker had been a black male because of the history of racial oppression and sexual ownership of black women by white men. ²⁵  Lesbian women who are assumed to be heterosexual and are whistled at are more likely to see that as unwanted harassment compared to heterosexual women since they are less likely to desire male attention.²⁶

From reading women’s experiences with street harassment on the anti-street harassment Web sites, it seems that the circumstances and characteristics of the harasser also played a role in influencing how women perceived the harassment.  Since people tended to write on the site after a particularly offensive or upsetting incident, it is hard to gauge how most felt about day to day harassment, though the people that did mention day to day harassment talked about them as negative experiences (see Table 4 above where approximately 36 people, or 5%, noted that harassment in general makes them feel scared or angry or upset).  Many people wrote about the experience they had as scary or horrific if it happened at night, in an unfamiliar place, or if they were in a secluded area.  On the other hand, some people wrote about how horrified they were that a man had grabbed them right in the middle of a crowded street and in broad daylight or that a man was harassing them on a crowded subway and no one around was reacting.  Several people discussed how the reaction they had to the incident they were talking about stemmed from their past experiences with street harassment.  For example, they chose to ignore the perpetrator because in a previous incident when they yelled back, the perpetrator had become more violent in his verbal comments. 

A frequent comment that warranted calculation was the frequency that respondents mentioned the age of the harasser and how that may have impacted whether or not they considered the harassment to be complimentary.  While a few women noted the harassers were around their age, most women who mentioned the age of the harasser did so in indignation either over how much older than them the harassers were or how shocked they were that young boys and teenagers were already harassing people.  About 145 postings, around 21%, included a sentence about the age of the harasser in relation to the person posting the comment or mentioned either the harasser’s age or the poster’s age to show how young the harasser was or how young the poster was when she was first harassed.  In comparison 28 people, around 4%, mentioned the race of the harasser and even fewer mentioned characteristics like the harasser’s height or weight or the clothes he was wearing.  Thus, the harasser’s age in comparison to victim appears to be the characteristic most disturbing to a woman who feels she is being harassed, or at least the one she may feel is most socially acceptable to talk about.

Understanding that women have internalized to varying degrees whether or not street harassment is complimentary, something to fear, or something to be indignant about, and that their feelings could change depending on the situation, their past experiences with street harassment, and the harasser’s characteristics, the next section looks at how women respond to street harassment.