‘I’d be in my school uniform’: the informal curriculum of street harassment

ABSTRACT

A growing body of literature has documented the pervasive occurrence of harassment in schools, and street-based harassment. However, to date there has been little attention to street-based harassment occurring in school-related contexts, such as walking to and from school in uniform. In this article, we aim to address this gap by exploring findings from 47 qualitative interviews with individuals who have experienced street and public harassment in Australia. Street harassment was commonly encountered by participants while they were in their school uniform, and beginning high school was often associated with the onset or increased intensity of street harassment. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power and feminist theorisation on embodiment, we argue that street harassment – and school responses to this harassment – functioned as an ‘informal curriculum’ that normalized the occurrence of harassment and produced young people’s bodies as sites of risk that required surveillance, control, and careful management through engagement in safety work.

KEYWORDS:

• Street harassment
• intrusion
• school uniform
• disciplinary power
• embodiment

Introduction

Emerging research and activism illustrate that street harassment often begins during adolescence, particularly for cisgender, heterosexual women (Johnson and Bennett 2015; Vera-Gray 2016). Women in Vera-Gray’s (2016, 122) UK-based research ‘almost unanimously reported that they were more likely to experience intrusion as a young woman’. UK-based activist group ‘Our Streets Now’ (2020) have highlighted the role of schools as sites of harassment through their ‘Our Schools Now’ project, while Plan International UK (2018, 37) found that ‘35 per cent of girls wearing school uniform have been sexually harassed in public’. Despite these findings pointing to the significance of schools as a site of heightened street harassment, there has been surprisingly little dedicated academic scholarship on school-related street harassment, particularly within the Australian context from which we write. In this article, we aim to address this gap by examining findings from a qualitative Australian study on street and public harassment. While this project explored participants’ experiences of harassment and intrusion across a range of public and semi-public spaces, we were struck by the repeated discussion of schools and school uniforms in participants’ narratives.

Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power, and feminist scholarship on embodiment, we argue that school-related harassment functions as an informal curriculum for young women and sexuality and gender-diverse young people. While, as Rawlings (2017, 37) observes, Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power was developed in relation to formal institutional practices, ‘they also offer a critical perspective of social mechanisms that occur outside of formal settings’, and it is in this respect that we apply the concept of disciplinary power to harassment in the school context. The experience of street harassment, and school responses to these experiences, did not always occur as part of formal school practices. However, by bringing Foucault into conversation with feminist theorisation on embodiment, we argue that both experiencing harassment and school responses to harassment involves processes of surveillance and judgment that act on and through the bodies of young people.

We take further inspiration here from Neville-Shepard (2019, 4) who, drawing on Lesko (1988), argues that school dress codes function as a ‘“curriculum of the body” (Lesko, 1988)’, and Harbach (2016, 1044), who suggests dress codes constitute an ‘everyday pedagogy’. These policies operate to train ‘nonconforming bodies … into submission through tactics of shaming’ and punishment (Neville-Shepard 2019, 4). School-related street harassment functions in a similar, though perhaps more diffuse and indirect, way. To draw on Ahmed (2017), street harassment, and institutional responses to this harassment, are ‘instructive’, working to inculcate young people with particular norms and ways of being in relation to gender and sexuality. These instructions in turn become embodied and second nature – surveillance becomes internalised and self-perpetuating (Rawlings 2017). Before examining our findings, we first situate this work further within the theoretical frameworks of embodiment and disciplinary power, and within the extant literature on schools, gender, and harassment. This paper then focuses on four themes: participants’ experiences and the impacts of harassment; the relationship between school uniform, vulnerability and risk, and the normalisation of harassment.

Theoretical framework

Our analysis is informed by aspects of Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, and the ways in which disciplinary techniques subsequently shape young people’s embodiment. Disciplinary power, as Foucault explains, involves the use of ‘subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it [the body] at the level of the mechanism itself – movements, gestures, attitudes’ (1977, 137). Disciplinary power operates in a diffuse, nebulous manner, and is exercised through multifaceted techniques of ‘surveillance, control, discrimination, spatial regulation, and classification’ (Çeven, Mithat, and Ömur 2021, 155). These techniques in turn shape our bodies, actions and minds in a way that becomes internalised and self-imposed (Çeven, Mithat, and Ömur 2021, 155).

Foucault’s work has been applied extensively in the school context (Çeven, Mithat, and Ömur 2021), including in relation to gender and heteronormativity (Graham, Treharne, and Nairn 2017; Kjaran 2019; Rawlings 2017; Woolley 2017). Indeed, schools are in many respects a disciplinary institution par excellence, as they are ‘structured by disciplinary practices that aim to educate young people and craft them into citizens who will be of use to their community’, including in terms of how they perform their gender (Graham, Treharne, and Nairn 2017, 1; see also Aghasaleh 2018; Dalley-Trim 2007; Hand and Sanchez 2000; Robinson 2013; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022; Young 2005 [1980]). Graham, Treharne, and Nairn (2017) argue that the repetitive gendered practices occurring within schools perpetuate stereotypical gender norms. Using the example of clothing, these authors observe how students may be reprimanded for ‘incorrect dress’ if they wear clothing that is not ‘deemed appropriate for their gender’ (2017, 2). In this case, disciplinary power reinscribes gendered norms of dress and bodily comportment, and further perpetuates the notion that gender is binary, ‘natural’ and immutable (in addition to reinscribing intersecting norms pertaining to race, class, and sexuality – see Aghasaleh 2018; Bowman 2020; Graham, Treharne, and Nairn 2017; Harris and Kruger 2020; McCullough 2017; Neville-Shepard 2019; Woolley 2017). The regulation of dress through dress codes and uniform teaches students ‘to regulate their bodies as docile and, therefore, good citizens’ (Aghasaleh 2018, 98). As we address later in this piece, clothing and school uniform was a key site of disciplinary power for participants.

Building on this, the concept of embodiment provides an avenue to understand the function and impacts of disciplinary power in relation to school-adjacent harassment. Using Young’s (2005 [1980]) work on the gendered acquisition of bodily movement and inhibition, we posit that a crucial component of gendered disciplinary practices within the school context is enacted through responses to street harassment – and particularly through the school uniform (typically, and often in Australia mandatorily, a dress or skirt) many girls are required to wear during their schooling years. In a material sense, the design of the dress or skirt does not give girls ‘the opportunity to use their full bodily capacities in free and open engagement with the world’ (Young 2005 [1980], 43). Girls’ school uniform acts to limit physical ability and agility, whereas boy’s school uniform typically allows a fuller range of movement and openness to the world. As a result, many schoolgirls actively learn to ‘hamper’ physical movement and to ‘be careful’ (Young 2005 [1980], 43). Within the larger context of gender and sexual identities, this does not mean that all boys feel comfort or freedom in their school uniform (usually shorts or pants), however Young’s earlier comments about bodily capacity holds true in relation to aspects of our participants’ experiences.

In relation to street harassment specifically – or what she terms men’s intrusions – Vera-Gray (2016, 122) posed the question of how these early, formative experiences of harassment shape ‘women’s sense of a bodily-self’. Adolescence represents a key formative period in young women’s lives, as it can represent a heightened period of surveillance and anxiety regarding sexual vulnerability and risk. As noted earlier, current research suggests that for many women adolescence is often when street harassment begins, and when it occurs most pervasively. However, this may not be the case for all women, or for those experiencing harassment relating to other forms of structural oppression, with research in this field typically centring the experiences of White, cis-gender, heterosexual women (see Fileborn & O’Neill, 2023, and Crenshaw 1991, more generally). These formative moments of harassment and intrusion act as a gendered pedagogy: they teach women ‘that this body can be acted on by men – that men’s intrusion is embedded in women’s embodiment’ (Vera-Gray 2016, 125). Such experiences often result in young women engaging in restrictive safety work, with the body becoming a site of ‘risk’ to be managed, rather than a source of agency and freedom. In time, this safety work ‘becomes habitual and … absorbed into the body’ (Vera-Gray 2016, 134). Building on Vera-Gray, we argue that street harassment functions as a form of disciplinary power that shaped how participants inhabited their bodies. Moreover, street harassment played a role in the normalisation and sedimentation (that is, habitual acquisition) of norms relating to gender and sexuality, though these norms were simultaneously contested and resisted.

Schools, gender, and harassment

Internationally, research demonstrates that sexual, gendered, and other harassment (particularly homophobic) are pervasive in schools (Crowley, Cornell, and Konold 2021; Dalley-Trim 2007; Espelage et al. 2016; Hand and Sanchez 2000; Kenway and Fitzclarence 1997; Kosciw et al. 2016; Larkin 1994; Lee et al. 1996; Lei et al. 2020; McCullough 2017). Unsurprisingly, this harassment is highly gendered in nature, with young women predominantly the targets and young men the harassers (Espelage et al. 2016; Lee et al. 1996). LGBTQ + young people also encounter high rates of harassment, with one US-based study finding that almost 9 in 10 young LGBTQ + people were the targets of harassment at school, with half of participants experiencing sexual harassment or harassment focused on their gender expression (Kosciw et al. 2016).

Experiencing harassment at school can manifest in a range of negative outcomes, including withdrawal from school and impaired academic performance, reduced emotional and psychological well-being, suicidal ideation, and self-harm (Crowley, Cornell, and Konold 2021; Dalley-Trim 2007; Hand and Sanchez 2000; Larkin 1994; Lee et al. 1996). In other cases, the sheer pervasiveness of school harassment means that young women are ‘more fatigued and irritated than enraged or frustrated’ (Harris and Kruger 2020, 16). Larkin (1994) argued that harassment at school holds particular significance given the centrality of school to the daily lives and routines of young people. As a result, Larkin suggests, ‘being harassed at school teaches young women to accept this behaviour as an inevitable component of their everyday life’ (1994, 264).

The ways in which school staff respond (or not) to harassment are also instrumental to shaping dynamics relating to gender and sexuality (Allen 2020; Graham, Treharne, and Nairn 2017; Harris and Kruger 2020). Allen (2020) observes that teachers have an important role to play in quashing homophobic discrimination at school. Unfortunately, Allen’s (2020, 264) summation of the research is that ‘teachers … [are] often ineffectual, and habitually instrumental, in the perpetuation of homophobia at school’. School-based harassment is rarely reported to teachers or administrative staff (Allen 2020; Kosciw et al. 2016). For those young people who do report to school staff, research consistently shows that the response was inadequate, with staff doing nothing or focusing on changing the behaviour of the victim (Bowman 2020; Kosciw et al. 2016; Our Streets Now 2020).

Our brief overview of the literature illustrates that sexual harassment is commonplace, if not pervasive, across schools in the Global North, though we are conscious that drawing this literature together necessarily collapses points of difference and nuance. Collectively this literature points towards cultures of poor or no intervention to sexual harassment in schools, in turn contributing towards a climate in which sexual harassment is normalised and condoned, with those who cause harm evading accountability for their actions (Larkin 1994). However, this work has typically focused on harassment occurring between peers or from teachers on school grounds. Our work extends this by looking at street and public harassment related to the school context, but not necessarily occurring on school grounds or by peers.

Methods

This article draws on findings from semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 47 participants from Victoria (VIC) and New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The interviews formed a component of a study examining victim-centred justice responses to street and public harassment. Street harassment was defined broadly in this project, taking a participant-centred approach that included any experience that the participant felt was harassment. This included sexual and gender-based harassment, as well as forms of harassment based on race, homophobia, and transphobia.

Participants were recruited using paid social media advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, unpaid social media promotion, and word of mouth. Key organisations, such as LGBTQ + community groups and sexual assault services, were also approached to promote the study. Eligibility requirements were for participants to be age 18 and older, to live in NSW or VIC, and to have self-defined experiences of street or public harassment. An overview of participant demographic details is provided in Table 1. Ethics approval was received from University of Melbourne HREC prior to commencing fieldwork activity. A more detailed discussion of some of the ethical considerations and safeguards utilized in this project is provided in Fileborn (2021). Participants were provided with a plain language statement, consent form, and contact details for relevant support services before and after the interview. The researcher also verbally ‘checked in’ with participants during and after the interviews and approached the interviews through a feminist lens that emphasized mutuality, attempting to mitigate the power relations between the researcher and participant.

Table 1. Overview of participant demographics.

Gender	Sexuality
Cisgender woman n = 32	Heterosexual n = 24
Cisgender man n = 5	Queer n = 6
Non-binary n = 3	Bisexual n = 10
Transmasculine/ transgender man n = 2	Lesbian n = 1
Transgender woman n = 2	Homosexual/gay n = 4
Agender n = 2	Pansexual/demi-sexual n = 2
Androgynous n = 1
Age*	Cultural background**
18–25 n = 17	White n = 35
26–30 n = 15	Asian n = 3
31–35 n = 6	African/White n = 1
36–40 n = 5	Indian/Indian-Australia n = 2
41 + n = 3	Filipino n = 2
	South America n = 1
	Hispanic n = 1
	Egyptian/New Zealand n = 1
	White/Indigenous n = 1

*One participant did not provide their age.

**The terminology used here reflects that used by participants.

Prior to the interview, participants were invited to complete a Google mapping exercise documenting their experiences of street harassment, with this map used as a starting point for discussion in the interviews. During the interviews, participants were asked to reflect on their experiences of harassment across their life course, including the form(s) of harassment encountered, impacts, locations of harassment, disclosure and reporting practices, and perspectives on how justice could be achieved in response to their experiences. Due to the COVID19 pandemic and geographical considerations, all but one of the interviews were conducted via Zoom. Interviews took between 1 and 2 h to complete, and participants’ time and expertise was recognized with a $100AUD gift card. The interviews were digitally recorded with participants’ consent and transcribed by a professional service.

Data analysis was undertaken by both authors, following Braun and Clarke’s (2021) approach to thematic analysis. This involved reading and familiarising ourselves with the interview transcripts, with tentative themes developed during this process. We then both coded a subset of transcripts and compared our analysis to develop a shared understanding of the data. The authors then met to discuss and finalize the codes, with both inductive and deductive coding used. School-based harassment sat under the deductive code ‘Contexts of Harassment’, with inductively derived sub-codes developed to capture participants’ experiences, including themes relating to school uniforms, vulnerability and sexualisation, and school responses to street harassment. Each author then took carriage of analysing half of the interview transcripts. Participants are referred to using pseudonyms. Our descriptions of participants’ demographic backgrounds reflects the language participants used to describe themselves during the interviews.

Findings

Discussing street harassment relating to school contexts is inextricably entwined with issues relating to the sexuality of young people. Street-based harassment often involves sexualised behaviour. As our ensuing discussion will demonstrate, it is also implicated in the sexualisation and objectification of young people, especially young women and girls. Moreover, some forms of this behaviour can be encountered or construed as wanted, desirable and ‘acceptable’ forms of flirtation. In problematising street harassment and conceptualising it as a form of harm that shapes young people’s embodiment, we are conscious not to reproduce discourses that depict young people as innocent, sexless beings requiring adult ‘protection’, or that perpetuate a moral panic around young people’s ‘risky’ sexual behaviour, legitimising the surveillance and regulation of (particularly) young women (Allen 2020; Angelides 2019; Ringrose 2012; Robinson 2013). Indeed, in privileging the voices and experiences of participants, we acknowledge and uphold their sexual agency in articulating these experiences as harmful. At the same time, we recognize that participants often drew on discourses relating to childhood innocence and leveraged these to make sense of their experiences.

Experiences of harassment

So, to begin with high school was where it started more extensively. (Charlie, 23, androgynous, pansexual/demi-sexual, White)

As this quote from Charlie intimates, for many participants high school was associated with the onset of, or substantial increase in, street harassment. Participants described incidents of harassment perpetrated by peers, groups of men, and individual men. Several participants discussed experiencing harassment and grooming by teachers, however harassers were more typically unknown men from outside the school context, and male peers. Notably, school-based harassment was commonly described as being perpetrated by ‘older men’, though what constituted ‘old’ was relative, and could refer to men who were simply older than the participant, as well as men in mid-to-late-life. Regardless, participants frequently noted the age-difference between themselves and their harasser(s). As Charlie (23, androgynous, pansexual/demi-sexual, White) described:

It was usually older guys, I’d place it between 40s and even 60s … who would just start randomly talking to me, and it was way more than just having a lovely conversation, it was very invasive questioning – stuff like oh how old are you, and you know I’m wearing a school uniform so not old enough you know.

Age difference played a central role in participants’ articulation of their naivety and vulnerability: that they were being inappropriately sexualised by someone in a position of power on account of their age (see also Hindes and Fileborn 2022). In doing so, participants were simultaneously drawing on tropes of childhood sexual innocence to render the harmful nature of these routinely trivialised experiences intelligible. However, as we discuss momentarily, the ability of young people to position themselves as sexually innocent and vulnerable can be delimited by race and class.

Actions such as catcalling, horn honking, staring/leering, unwanted conversation and following in cars were all commonly encountered, while a smaller number of participants discussed experiences of indecent exposure, public masturbation, frottage (typically while travelling on public transport in their school uniform), sexual assault and rape. In addition to sexualised harassment, other participants described being targeted because of their sexuality and/or gender identity. Aaron (36, trans masculine, bisexual, White) recalled experiencing homophobic abuse from students from a neighbouring school, saying ‘I was identifying as female at the time … and they yelled out at us [Aaron and his girlfriend] like homophobic things about being lesbians, and that they were going to bash us and stuff’. Charlie (23, androgynous, pansexual/demi-sexual, White) similarly described routine harassment from other students, including:

Random … school kids coming up to me and asking what my sexuality was and asking really invasive questions along those lines. So, it just became that oh yeah and I don’t go here, and I don’t go there and that’s my life now, I guess.

River (19, agender, bisexual, Filipino) discussed an incident of racist abuse that occurred on a bus when they were no longer a student, which was perpetrated by a schoolboy in uniform. However, interestingly, no other participants of colour discussed incidents of racist abuse relating specifically to the school context. Participants of colour did discuss experiences of racist harassment, and sexualised racist comments, in non-school contexts. Donna (18, cisgender woman, heterosexual/questioning, Asian) described experiencing racist verbal abuse from other children when she was also a child, however it was unclear whether this occurred in a school context. Thus, while racist harassment certainly occurs within the school context, it was not explicitly captured in participants’ narratives.

It may also be the case that participants of colour were targeted for sexualised harassment by perpetrators because of their race, due to the sexualization of women and girls of colour (see, for example, Dagbovie-Mullins 2013; Ryan 2019; Teshome and Yang 2018), though the precise dynamics at play here differ across racial groups (see, for example, Matsumoto 2020). This sexualization and positioning of girls of colour as ‘adults’ or sexually knowledgeable is also likely to shape which young people are able draw on discourses of childhood innocence and vulnerability (discussed above) in articulating the harms of public harassment. The race and class dynamics of harassment were also apparent in Tenesha’s (22, cisgender woman, bisexual, Indian Australian) reflection of a time when a man masturbated on a tram in front of her while she was in her school uniform. Tenesha said she didn’t tell her ‘sheltered middle-class white’ peers about what happened, as she ‘didn’t think that they would be able to process [it]’ and would be ‘disturbed’ by what happened. Tenesha did, however, disclose her experience to a friend ‘who was definitely not middle class’ and who had previously disclosed similar experiences to Tenesha. Tenesha’s comments implicitly convey that both class and race privilege may shape the extent and nature of young women’s experiences of harassment, and explicitly informed Tenesha’s decision-making process in relation to disclosure.

Collectively, participants’ experiences indicated that street harassment was a pervasive occurrence which often began during high school. The experiences discussed here begin to point to the impacts this harassment had on participants’ lives, and we move on to consider this in further detail.

Impacts of harassment

While street harassment is often trivialised or dismissed as a form of harm, the impacts of these experiences could be profound. Donna (18, cisgender woman, heterosexual/questioning, Asian) linked the impacts of her experiences to being in school uniform, as this meant that men:

Know which school you go to … which is quite scary and they’re honking at you and they’re making comments at you while you’re on your way to a place of learning.

School uniforms were social and geographical identifiers which made some participants scared or cautious because it enabled men to know their everyday routes. For Evelyn (27, cisgender woman, bisexual, White), who was gang-raped by male students and subsequently routinely harassed by her perpetrators and their friends, this experience profoundly impacted upon her ability to complete her high school education. Evelyn described how she ‘would be like getting out of my car or walking up to the school to sit an exam and they would be like screaming slut at me’. As a result, Evelyn withdrew from her final year at high school after being unable to sit her exams because ‘my brain couldn’t compute because I just knew they were like there somewhere’. While the initial rape was highly traumatic, the ensuing harassment further contributed to her leaving.

Chrissy (22, cisgender woman, queer, White) discussed an experience in early high school at the beginning of summer. As the weather was warming up, Chrissy removed her winter uniform tights during the day as she became too hot, something she remembered ‘really vividly’:

I was very self-conscious of how pale my legs were, especially after a winter in tights. And a car pulled up really slow next to me and the guy just blew me a kiss, and I was like 13, and that’s probably the earliest one I remember, because I’d been so self-conscious all day and then it had happened. I was like oh well I guess I’m never baring my legs in public ever again, gross.

In the aftermath of this experience, Chrissy said she ‘wore stockings for a lot longer than I wanted to at school’, despite the increasingly hot weather. Drawing from Young (2005 [1980]), a mundane everyday activity of dressing according to the weather becomes a bodily project which requires cautious attention. Chrissy formed a strong association between the harassment occurring and her legs being ‘on display’, though she simultaneously contested the notion that she was responsible for the harassment, saying ‘he was a creep and who would’ve done it anyway’. River (19, agender, bisexual, Filipino) had a boy from a nearby school tell them their ‘legs are sexy’ as they were walking to school. River felt this comment was intended to be sarcastic, with the implicit message that they had ‘big thighs’. River described feeling ‘so gross’ because:

The outfit I was wearing at the time I remember it was like a pair of overalls I sewed by myself, and I was really proud of them, and I thought they looked great – and I just felt so defeated because I worked so hard on [the outfit] and I also felt like ashamed of like my size and my gender.

Collectively, the experiences shared here illustrate how street harassment functions as a form of disciplinary power shaping young people’s embodiment. River’s experience encapsulates how harassment shifts their bodily experience from one of skill and accomplishment to shame and defeat. Both River and Chrissy encounter policing or surveillance of their bodies on account of some perceived failure or refusal to embody normative femininity, with River being misgendered in this case. In both examples we can see a process of internalisation and subsequent self-surveillance, with the actions of men and boys working to shape and delimit their sense of self and capacity for action in the world (Vera-Gray 2016). For Chrissy, this harassment operated alongside the gendered policing and objectification that young women experience generally, with the harassment amplifying the self-consciousness she already felt about her pale legs. Thus, harassment is working in a cumulative manner, reaffirming the broader social messages that young women receive about the need to monitor and manage their body to adhere to normative femininity.

School uniform, vulnerability and risk

School uniform played a central role in participants’ narratives, particularly as they traversed to and from school, and we move on to further explore the significance of school uniform. Coraline (18, cisgender woman, bisexual, White) spoke of experiencing upskirting while in school uniform – the practice of taking non-consensual photographs up girls and women’s skirts. She discussed her experiences of avoiding certain parts of school grounds because of this form of harassment:

There was a certain ramp in our school that … you sit under and if you walked up there you knew they [male peers] were going to look up your skirt, it was just like avoiding that ramp and doing stuff like that.

Bridging Foucault, Young and Vera-Gray, men’s intrusion into schoolgirls’ personal space creates scenarios whereby simple everyday tasks such as walking on school grounds becomes a project that requires attention (Young 2005 [1980]), and can be understood as something which over time foments ongoing self-surveillance whereby young women are conditioned to act and move in certain ways to avoid harassment.

Walking to and from school in uniform was frequently referred to as an everyday activity during which participants encountered street harassment. The range of mobilities afforded to young people often places them in contexts where street harassment is heightened, due to needing to walk to and from school or catching public transport (with these mobilities further shaped by class). As such, these spaces between home and school often engendered situations of heightened exposure, vulnerability, risk, and isolation. As Chrissy (22, cisgender woman, queer, White) described:

So, walking from high school to home … that’s where most of the harassment I’ve experienced happened. Which is gross. As soon as I stopped wearing a school uniform it happened less. So that’s disgusting for a lot of reasons.

Similarly, Yasmin (28, cisgender woman, heterosexual, Hispanic) also experienced street harassment while wearing her school uniform. She described her experience of being followed by a car, and her subsequent cognisance to which routes were deemed safer:

I started walking the long way. I started just going through the main roads, avoiding the back streets, even though it was a longer walk to be extra safe. You know especially because I couldn’t see who it was, I couldn’t see who was looking at me, and yeah, and I was in my school uniform at that time.

Participants described ‘actively enact[ing] [their] own body inhibition’ (Young 2005 [1980], 44) through engagement in safety work after experiencing and/or anticipating street harassment (Vera-Gray and Kelly 2020). Just as Young describes ‘the young girl acquires many subtle habits of feminine body comportment – walking like a girl, tilting her head like a girl, standing and sitting like a girl, gesturing like a girl, and so on’ (Young 2005 [1980], 43), participants embodied restricted and self-monitored movement through the world.

In contrast to the idea that school uniforms were sexualised or signifiers of vulnerability and innocence, some participants spoke about their school uniform being ‘disgusting’, ‘ugly’, or very conservative in terms of the skirt length and having minimal exposed skin. Ursula (20, cisgender woman, heterosexual, White) explicitly identified that her uniform was dowdy, un-sexy and not ‘inviting’, yet she still encountered street harassment. This created a confusing situation for Ursula, where she thought ‘I’m covered neck to knees’ yet still experiencing street harassment. This apparent disjuncture allowed Ursula to develop the understanding that street harassment was actually ‘just some kind of twisted power thing’, and she began to challenge the notion of cat calling being complimentary or her responsibility. Continuing, Ursula said:

I follow quite a few very sex positive people on Instagram and feminists so I saw this thing a lot apparently when you go on Google images and search for schoolboy it will come up with like a 5-year-old boy but then schoolgirl it will come up with the sexy schoolgirl costume which is pretty sick and so I guess I’ve just kind of always it attributed to vulnerability is apparently appealing.

In describing an experience of being on a bus in school uniform, Tenesha (22, cisgender woman, bisexual, Indian Australian) spoke of an experience where two men were audibly referring to her as ‘jailbait’:

There was no way they thought I was 18 and that’s why they said jailbait. And that was part of the allure for them as well, like you know the innocence of a schoolgirl, a fearful schoolgirl in that situation, was like hot to them, they were really getting off on it.

Tenesha stressed that she did not want to ‘yuck anyone’s yum’ in relation to consenting adults engaging in fantasy play about schoolgirls. However, she also recognized that she was not ‘a fantasy, I was a real schoolgirl, and I wasn’t consenting’. Indeed, Tenesha speculated that it was precisely this lack of consent that ‘some men would find really arousing that … she’s young and innocent and pure and you’re like this older person who could really have a lot of power over her’, something Tenesha felt was further normalized through the mainstream porn industry. Tenesha and Ursula’s comments begin to build a more complex picture of how street harassment works as a form of disciplinary power: the sheer pervasiveness of harassment is situated alongside the absence of a framework for young people to articulate or make sense of this behaviour, particularly outside of tropes relating to childhood innocence and vulnerability. Moreover, cultural norms actively work to sanction the harassment of (particularly) young girls through their construction as ‘sexy jailbait’. As we highlighted earlier, the sexualization and ‘adultification’ of young girls and women of colour may heighten their being targeted for harassment, further contributing towards the normalization of public harassment for this cohort. Collectively, these factors actively produce young people as vulnerable and desirable targets for harassment, while simultaneously constructing harassment as ‘normal’ – as something to be expected and managed. Yet, in other cases, the decidedly ‘unsexy’ nature of some school uniforms enabled participants to contest and resist this normalisation. We move on now to further explore how street harassment was normalized within the school context, and the ways in which this normalisation facilitated the disciplinary potential of harassment.

Normalisation

Street harassment was often normalized and dismissed as a form of harm by participants (though they retrospectively came to understand these experiences as harmful, as we discuss below), as well others around them, particularly teachers. In part, the sheer prevalence and commonality of street harassment in participants’ lives contributed to its normalisation: street harassment became a mundane part of daily life, and ‘sort of faded into the background after a while’ (Charlie, 23, androgynous, pansexual/demi-sexual, White). Alex (26, non-binary, queer, White) similarly recounted the routine harassment of their female friends by adult men from early high school onwards. Alex said this harassment was encountered so frequently that it became expected, and they ‘internalised the idea that it’s like nothing can really be done about that. That you know men are just creeps and that’s what they do.’ Yasmin (28, cisgender woman, heterosexual, Hispanic) discussed several experiences of being followed by older men in cars while wearing her school uniform, with the repetitive nature of these experiences contributing towards their normalisation:

For me it was strange, but then at the same time I’m like wait is this normal, because it happened to me last year with the red car, and now it’s happened to me with this white car … And but you know what the bad thing about this is that I never actually thought to do anything about it, you know, I never actually thought it was a big deal, I thought it was just something that happens to people.

Participants in Larkin’s (1994) study on school-based harassment similarly reported that it occurred so frequently that they viewed the behaviour as a ‘normal’ and routine part of their school lives (see also Odenbring and Johansson 2019; Woolley 2017). The young women in Larkin’s study likewise encountered the routine minimisation and dismissal of men’s harassment, with these actions often framed as a ‘joke’.

Several participants discussed how they initially found harassment to be flattering behaviour, or that they were unsure of how to interpret their experiences at the time. Coraline (28, cisgender woman, bisexual, White) described one of her first experiences of street harassment saying:

I went from being an innocent child to a child that felt uncomfortable and didn’t know why I was sexualised – and I didn’t understand it because I didn’t understand what sex really was or anything like that.

Fiona (31, cisgender woman, heterosexual, White), for example, recalled being wolf-whistled at by a ‘group of tradies and … I felt proud at the time, I’m like ooh we must look good’, while on a school excursion and dressed in school uniform. Fiona came to understand her experiences as harassment in retrospect, saying ‘now I’m looking back I’m like I was in year 10 and I was wearing a school uniform, like I was so obviously young, why would you whistle … why is that okay, I’m a kid.’ Bridget (24, cisgender woman, heterosexual, White) came to the same realisation, saying ‘now that I’m older I think that’s absolutely disgusting … these men obviously knew I was underage, being in my school uniform … you probably have kids the same age, what is wrong with you?’

This retrospective re-evaluation was a notable trend in participants’ accounts of street harassment. One way of understanding this is attuning to the role of widespread normalisation – participants often lacked the language to capture and express the harms of harassment (see also Larkin 1994, 267). For many participants, it was not until they were exposed to feminist politics in their early adulthood that they came to understand the nature of their experiences. Vera-Gray (2016, 126) argues that these formative experiences ‘occurred before women had developed experiential knowledge of men’s intrusive practices as connected’. In other words, it is not possible to articulate harassment as a pervasive, cumulative occurrence until this behaviour has been lived over time. As Ahmed (2021, 114–115) puts it, ‘it is only afterward, in hindsight, that it becomes clear … When what you experience ‘at the time’ is part of the culture, you don’t identify it at the time you experience it’. Further, we suggest it is important to acknowledge the contradictory and fluid nature of participants’ experiences: it is equally possible for participants to have experienced harassment as pleasurable and to come to understand it as a harm following further experiences and exposure to new lens for making sense of these experiences.

The normalisation of street harassment was further compounded by the responses of teachers and schools. In line with previous research on school-based harassment, most participants did not disclose their experiences to teachers or other staff (Allen 2020; Kosciw et al. 2016; Our Streets Now 2020). Coraline (28, cisgender woman, bisexual, White) said she did not report incidents to her teachers because ‘most of them were sexist pigs anyway like they if anything they were pervs as well … so it was like why would they say anything when they also perpetrate’. A small number of participants said that they had received sympathetic responses from teachers, but that there was ultimately little they could do in response to incidents of street harassment, particularly when perpetrated by someone outside of the school community:

They were supportive if anybody ever went to a teacher and said this happened to me, it wasn’t dismissed, but it was also like well I’ll help you deal with those feelings, but I can’t help you stop it happening … What can the school do really, realistically, they can’t have a teacher walk every child home. (Chrissy, 22, cisgender woman, queer, White)

This type of sympathetic (if still ineffective or lacklustre) response was not common amongst participants. River (19, agender, bisexual, Filipino) contrasted the approach their school took to students smoking in uniform with the response they received after reporting harassment from another student. They described how after one student smoked in their uniform the school distributed an email to all students instructing them to ‘stop smoking in your school uniform at the train station’. Because of this, River initially felt confident that ‘the school is going to be like boys stop harassing’. However, because River was unable to identify the boy who had harassed them, ‘they were like sorry we can’t help you’. River described being ‘really angry’ at this lack of response and accountability and located their experience as ‘a systematic problem’ that extended beyond the actions of any one boy at the school.

Multiple participants discussed responses from schools that focused on the appearance and behaviour of young women, rather than the actions of those engaging in harassment. This surveillance and regulation of young women’s appearance occurred in response to reported incidents of harassment, as well as through the general enforcement of uniform policy. Alex (26, non-binary, queer, White) said that while their female friends did not report specific incidents to the school:

The general preventative response was that you know we have had instances happen, the way to handle this is for you to dress appropriately and to you know carry yourself with certain composure and if you do that then these things will be less likely to happen, and if they do happen we’ll be better equipped to respond to it … without it being complicated by the fact that you did something wrong.

They also discussed girls and boys being separated to have a meeting after an incident of peer harassment in the school. At the time Alex was presenting as male (and was thus sent to the ‘boys’ group) but found out later from their female friends that they ‘were told by the deputy principal that by wearing their skirt too short they would never be taken seriously enough to get a stable career and that they are disrespecting the school’. Tenesha (22, cisgender woman, bisexual, Indian Australian) described numerous incidents of teachers policing and reprimanding female students in relation to the length of their uniform (a school dress). Tenesha said that while this policy was rarely complied with by students, teachers would attempt to enforce the policy by having the girls stand at the front of the classroom to measure the length of their skirts. The teacher would then ‘disparage’ those students whose uniform did not comply with the policy:

And she said to us why would you wear your skirt like this, like who are you trying to impress, whose attention are you trying to get, you know what if there's a paedophile when you're on the tram home from school, what if there's some paedophiles who are looking at your legs and thinking this is the best day of their life, is that what you want, do you want the attention of paedophiles.

The length of the boy’s uniform was not subject to the same regulation, with Tenesha observing this ‘massive double standard’. Tenesha said that she ‘definitely internalised those messages too, as much as I tried to resist them’. The comments conveyed by Tenesha and Alex exemplify disciplinary power in relation to the regulation of gender – we can see the reification of binary gender (and attendant assumptions about precisely who is a target of harassment) through the segregation of students into ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ groups. Further, the teachers’ comments work to instruct young women on the ‘correct’ performance of (White, middle-class) femininity, with their bodies and sartorial choices located as a site to be managed lest they bring ‘disrespect’ onto themselves or the school.

Our findings echo those of Allen (2020), Larkin (1994) and others who found that teachers often did nothing in response to homophobic and sexual harassment, something which also appears to be the case in relation to street harassment. In turn, this contributed towards the normalisation of street harassment. A non-response is instructive in this regard – it becomes a response communicating that street harassment is a non-issue (see generally Ahmed 2021). Participants’ discussions also illustrate how the official school policy and curriculum mutually reinforces and co-constitutes the informal curriculum of street harassment, with these instruments typically working to minimize and normalize the actions of perpetrators, and shift blame to the ‘inappropriate’ sexuality of young women vis-à-vis their uniform length (Neville-Shepard 2019). As Graham, Treharne, and Nairn (2017, 4) note, school uniforms provide a means to survey and regulate young women’s performance of ‘appropriate’ or ‘respectable’ femininity (which is in turn deeply intertwined with class and race – see Harris and Kruger 2020). In line with participants’ experiences, while this focus on school uniform was positioned as embedded in concern for women’s safety, ‘this discourse normalizes uncontrollable heterosexual male desire and positions young women as responsible for ensuring they do not provoke this desire’ (Graham, Treharne, and Nairn 2017, 4; see also Bowman 2020; Neville-Shepard 2019; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). Such responses actively reproduce the problem they seek to address, while simultaneously working to discipline the bodies of young women and LGBTQ + people – with their bodies located as the ‘source’ of the problem and thus requiring corrective action.

Conclusion

In this article, we examined street harassment relating to the school context, including travel to and from school. Findings from this qualitative project add further weight to the notion that adolescence is a time of heightened exposure to street harassment. Building on the relatively extensive literature on harassment at school occurring between peers, our work demonstrates that this harassment does not end at the school gate. Rather, the geographies of school-based harassment extend far beyond the literal school grounds.

We have drawn on Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power alongside feminist work on embodiment to argue that school-related harassment – and the response of schools to this harassment – shapes young people’s embodiment. The sheer pervasiveness and normalisation of harassment, in conjunction with school responses that typically sought to regulate the appearance and behaviour of young people, functions as an ‘informal curriculum’ of street harassment. The disciplinary power of street harassment lies, at least in part, within its normalisation: in the absence of discourses positioning street harassment as a harm or locating the ‘problem’ within the actions of harassers and the broader systems of power in which they act, young people’s bodies are instead produced as sites of risk that required surveillance, control, and careful management through engagement in safety work. Indeed, participants frequently drew on discursive constructions of young people as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘innocent’ to express the harms of their experiences. This simultaneously (and inadvertently) perpetuated discourses of young people as ‘at-risk’ that lend themselves to the disciplinary control participants were subjected to. However, as we have argued, the ability of young people to leverage discourses of vulnerability and innocence is itself likely to be shaped by race and class, with white and/or middle-class young people more able to position themselves in this way. That vulnerability and innocence were dominant themes in our findings is itself likely an artefact of the predominantly White and almost exclusively middle-class make-up of our participant cohort.

We nonetheless remain optimistic about the possibility for schools to function as a site of social change and transformation. For instance, there is a clear role for schools to deliver education that challenges the normalisation of harassment and provides young people with the language and frameworks to make sense of their experiences without reproducing limiting gendered norms and stereotypes. We also echo the calls of other researchers regarding the need to train teachers in bystander intervention and responding to disclosure of sexual harassment (see, e.g. Edwards, Rodenhizer, and Eckstein 2020). We close expressing the hope that we can transform this informal curriculum of normalisation and internalisation of responsibility to a progressive curriculum that works to unsettle the foundations of street harassment.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (DE190100404). Our thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DE190100404].

Notes on contributors

Bianca Fileborn

Dr Bianca Fileborn is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Their work examines sexual violence, public harassment, and justice responses to gendered violence.

Jess Hardley

Jess Hardley is a feminist, embodiment and mobile media scholar. She holds a PhD in Media and Communication and a Research Master's degree in Gender Studies. Her research focuses on phenomenology, urban space and gendered experiences of safety and risk. She currently works as a Research Assistant at the University of Melbourne.