Combatting insecurity in the everyday: the global anti-street harassment movement as everyday security practitioners

ABSTRACT

Street harassment renders countless women, girls and others insecure in their everyday lives. Over the past two decades a global grassroots movement developed to combat street harassment and its attendant insecurities. But neither phenomenon has excited the attention of Security Studies, critical or otherwise. In this paper, we focus on the global anti-street harassment movement, conceptualising its activists as ‘everyday security practitioners’ who, like privileged security practitioners in the state or the academy, theorise street harassment and devise and implement strategies to tackle it. In so doing we argue that Security Studies should pay more attention to the everyday, to insecurities like street harassment, and to such ‘everyday security practitioners’. To illustrate this argument we first define street harassment. We then consider Security Studies and its exclusion of the everyday. To argue for its inclusion in Security Studies, we explicate the diverse insecurities produced by street harassment, conceptualise 'everyday security practitioners’, and provide some illustrations of strategies deployed by the global anti-street harassment movement both to bring street harassment to wider public attention as a pervasive everyday insecurity and to combat it. We conclude with two suggestions for Security Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical security studies
• everyday insecurity
• everyday security practitioners
• feminist security studies
• global anti-street harassment movement
• street harassment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hollaback! changed its name to ‘Right To Be’ in March 2022.

2. For example, criminalisation is a common strategy in Latin America, though this tactic is rejected by other activists in the global movement (e.g. Hollaback!, n.d. a), who fear that marginalised groups may be targeted.

3. We emphatically do not assume that everyday theory and practice is necessarily progressive or a ‘good’ thing, as the everyday theorising and activities of, e.g. racist activists clearly indicate.

4. The Free Dictionary, online at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/harassment [accessed 7 August 2021].

5. These distinctions are complex, problematic and subject to legal adjudication. Shopping malls illustrate this complexity: while technically private, they are ‘the street’ in terms of the harassment of shoppers.

6. Lego apologised for this sexist bit of marketing (Ellin 2013).

7. Explaining why women find such behaviours flattering is beyond the scope of this paper. Debates about self-objectification and self-sexualisation are extensive (e.g. Calogero, et al. 2011; Choi and DeLong 2019).

8. This definition, like analyses of biopower, generally replace the state with the population – the collective human subject (Lemanski 2012) – as the referent object of security, focusing in a top-down manner on securing resilient collective subjects (e.g. Chandler 2012). Less attention is devoted to the insecurities of individuals and to grassroots attempts to provide individuals with security. ‘Human security’ thus does not itself address the everyday.

9. It also means that how ‘the everyday’ is best defined depends on its intended uses, which vary across disciplines, whether Cultural Studies (e.g. Storey 2014), Sociology (e.g. Jacobsen 2009) or Security Studies (e.g. Lemanski 2012; Mitchell 2011).

10. We of course recognise that many literatures deal with the ‘everyday’. For example, Feminist Peace Research deals with ‘the everyday’ of women and children in conflict zones. We are highlighting a limitation with the conceptualisation of the everyday within Security Studies.

11. Police and security forces sometimes compound and exacerbate these insecurities by ignoring complaints, trivialising harassment or becoming perpetrators themselves (Abdelmonem 2015; ActionAid International 2011). Security forces also sometimes intentionally use harassment and sexual assault against women as a political strategy of intimidation, e.g. in Cairo during the Tahrir Square protests in 2011 (Langohr 2013).

12. The empirical part of this section draws on Desborough’s PhD research (Desborough 2020) and on a related ESRC-funded project (see 'Funding' below) in which she conducted semi-structured interviews with 33 anti-street harassment activists, based in 11 countries – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Germany, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, the UK and the US – during three interview phases between 2014 and 2019. Key informants within the global anti-street harassment movement were selected for their expertise on anti-street harassment activism. The interviews were transcribed and then coded using NVivo to analyse the data systematically through thematic analysis. The activists quoted have given permission for their words to be used. Both authors are white, Western, female scholars, based in the UK. Desborough focuses on feminist activism against sexual violence, Weldes on world politics and sometimes on security studies. The positionality of Desborough, who conducted the fieldwork interviews, is discussed in her thesis (2020, pp. 66–68).

13. Street harassment had of course previously been challenged, e.g. by the suffragettes in the early 1900s and by second wave feminism in the 1970s (Kearl 2015, xii-xvi).

14. Our main period of analysis is 2010–2016 when the movement was at its height in terms of activity and global growth.

15. Most anti-street harassment initiatives are self-financed grassroots groups but some have become not-for-profit NGOs, e.g. HarassMap, Hollaback! New York, Safecity and SSH. Those groups in receipt of funding have different funding sources, including from foundations, government financing, individual organisations, and by providing fee-based workshops to businesses and offering training, technology and data support to NGOs (Desborough 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based in part on research funded by the ESRC Transforming Social Science Programme [ES/L003171/1].

Notes on contributors

Karen Desborough

Karen Desborough is a feminist researcher interested in global feminist activism, especially resistance to sexual violence. Her research is interdisciplinary, situated within the field of social movement studies with a feminist and cultural perspective. Her PhD research examined the emergence, development and key dimensions of the global anti-street harassment movement.

Jutta Weldes

Jutta Weldes is Professor of International Relations at the University of Bristol. Her main research interest is in the ideological labour that goes into the construction of common sense about US foreign policy and about world politics more generally. This has included analyses of the Cuban missile crisis and other aspects of US foreign policy, as well as analyses of popular culture and world politics, including Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, science fiction as a genre, and the diamond engagement ring.