Framing street harassment: legal developments and popular misogyny in social media

ABSTRACT

In September 2015, following the ratification of Istanbul Convention by Portugal, addressing someone with unwanted verbal “sexual proposals” became a criminal offence. This however, barely meets the requirements of the treaty and is far from what was first discussed about sexual harassment both in the Portuguese Parliament and more broadly in the media. When the criminalization of “piropo”—the Portuguese colloquial word for “catcalling”—was first proposed, it sparked heated opposition in online discussions, revealing strong prejudices against women and anti-feminist sentiments. Aiming to contribute to the understudied area of street harassment, this article maps the ways in which its legal developments were framed and counter-framed between August 2013 and September 2018, corresponding to the period before, during and after its adoption. Methodologically, we worked through the combination of quantitative and interpretative methods in order to understand gender politics in public policy making, through the study of news media texts and readers’ comments posted on Facebook. We argue that whereas feminist interpretations found their way into media texts, reader’s discussions expressed the popular misogyny that shaped the law reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Street harassment
• violence against women
• frame analysis
• feminist critical discourse analysis
• misogyny

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See, for.example, Euronews, 23/10/2017 “Portuguese judge uses Bible to excuse abusive husband”. https://www.euronews.com/2017/10/23/portuguese-judge-sparks-row-with-use-of-bible-to-defend-domestic-violence.

2. “Engole o teu piropo”, Fórum Socialismo 2013.

3. Capazes, whose founding activists are Portuguese national media celebrities, was first created in December 2014, under the name Maria Capaz. Given the absence or the low popularity on Facebook of other feminist organizations, we chose Capazes’s Facebook page, which publications only started in late 2015. In March 2016, it had about 145.000 followers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Basílio Simões

Rita Basílio Simões holds a PhD in Communication Sciences, with a thesis on Crime, punishment and gender. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information, where she teaches Journalism and Communication Sciences. Her main research areas include journalism and media with a focus on feminist studies, social representations of violence, crime and criminal justice with an emphasis on gender, and the regulation of media and journalism. E-mail: [email protected]

Maria João Silveirinha

Maria João Silveirinha is Associate Professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her research interests are on the issue of relationship between identities and communication with a focus on feminist media studies, communicative rights of women, their media representations and political and social aspects of the media public sphere. She is currently vice-president of the Portuguese Women’s Studies Association. E-mail: [email protected]