Street harassment: A missing piece in measuring women’s public safety

Street harassment can cause people to feel heightened fear, withdraw from their communities, and experience a decline in their mental and physical health.

Harassment in public spaces reflects social norms and inequalities in communities that tolerate or normalise such behaviours.

Despite evidence that street harassment is arguably the most pervasive to women’s safety in public places, very little is known about the prevalence or patterns of such behaviours that can be generalised to whole populations.

A recent study, published by researchers at the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, argues that research that seeks to understand experiences in, and perceptions of, public places is leaving out an important factor in the analysis – street harassment.

The researchers conducted a systematic review of survey instruments that measure harassment in public spaces.

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While researchers have pointed to the importance of understanding street harassment for more than 30 years, surveys that have sought to measure prevalence and patterns have predominantly emerged in only the past six years.

The Monash study highlighted a lack of a clear conceptualisation of street harassment within the quantitative literature, speaking to the lack of a clear definition of street harassment as a phenomenon in its own right.

The review also found that approaches to measuring street harassment were inconsistent across each study.

Without a consistent framework for defining and measuring street harassment, it’s difficult to gain a sense of how pervasive/prevalent/widespread these experiences are for different groups of people.

In fact, studies have reported inconsistent prevalence rates. At the minimum, 22% of respondents experience street harassment, and at the maximum an alarming 95% of respondents experience street harassment. We see the highest rates of harassment in LGBTQI+ populations.

The review found that the quantitative tools used to measure street harassment do not clearly reflect these lived experiences.

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There were a number of definitions offered in the scholarship that defined the victim (a woman), the place (the street), the perpetrator’s relationship to the victim (a stranger or unknown man), and the behaviour (unwanted or unwelcome).

For example, migrant and refugee women’s experiences may be limited without a definition that allows for gendered and racial motivations to the harassment.

We know there are intersecting motivations from other research that examines workplace sexual harassment.

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To design effective prevention strategies in response to street harassment, research must first effectively measure the prevalence of street harassment, and the contexts in which street harassment occurs.

In addition to a consistent definition, studies that examine street harassment should seek to capture details about the perpetrator.

Approaches that seek to create safer spaces for women, LGBTQI+ populations, and migrant and refugee women that don’t consider street harassment may be missing a significant piece of the puzzle.

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This article was co-authored with Jacques Mellberg, Queensland University of Technology.