Street Harassment Resources

 

Books & articles on street harassment:

Bowman, Cynthia Grant. "Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women," Harvard Law Review 106, no 3 (January 1993): 517-580.

Bowman examines how the law can ignore the harmful experiences of women, including their experiences with harassment in public by strangers. She evaluates the criminal and civil laws that might be used to stop harassment and examines their failings. She proposes new methods for stopping street harassment and opening up the public sphere to women.

Fogg-Davis, Hawley. "Theorizing Black Lesbians within Black Feminism: A Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment. Politics & Gender, 2 (2006): 57-76.

Fogg-Davis discusses how street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semi-public places, and the ways in which black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race and the race of their harasser(s). She also addresses issues of harassment of lesbian women.

Gardner, Carol Brooks. Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

Passing By explores the important yet little-examined issue of gender-related public harassment. Based on extensive research--including in-depth interviews with nearly five-hundred women and men in Indiana --it documents the many types of indignity visited on women in public places. Harassment in public, Gardner shows, crosses all lines of age, class, and ethnicity and follows a typical pattern whereby a man or men take advantage of a woman's momentary or permanent vulnerability. Beyond describing the scope and variety of harassing behaviors, the book investigates the different ways women and men respond to and interpret them.

Langelan, Martha. Back Off: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers (New York: Fireside, 1993).

Back Off! will change your life if you've always felt there was nothing to do about "compliments," gropes, and the fear of assault on the streets. Back Off! examines the dynamics of sex and power in sexual harassment, the motives behind harassers' actions, and why traditional responses such as appeasement or aggression don't work, and describes the successful resistance strategies that you really can use -- including nonviolent personal confrontation techniques, group confrontations, administrative remedies, and formal lawsuits. The second half of the book are street harassment confrontation sucess stories sent in to Langelan when she worked as the president of the Washington, DC Rape Crisis Center and particular show the experiences of women in the Washington, DC area.

Nielsen, Laura Beth. License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

License to Harass looks at the causes and responses to street harassment in three categories, begging, racial harassment and sexual harassment. She particularly looks at why there are no laws in place to stop offensive and damaging verbal abuse on the street and what people's opinions are of the potential of such laws (the opinions of both those who experience the harassment and those who do not). She conducts her interviews in the San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley area.

Others:

  • Benard, Cheryl and Edit Schlaffer. “’The Man in the Street’: Why He Harasses” (1996).

  • Davis, Diedre. “The Harm That Has No Name: Street Harassment, Embodiment, and African American Women” (1997).

  • Drucker, Susan and Gary Gumpert. "Shopping Women, and Public Space." In Voices in the Street: Explorations in Gender, Media, and Public Space. Eds Susan J. Drucker and Gary Gumpert (New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc: 1996).

  • Duneier, Mitchell. "Talking to Women" in Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000).

  • Fayer, Joan. "Changes in Gender Use of Public Space in Puerto Rico." In Voices in the Street: Explorations in Gender, Media, and Public Space. Eds Susan J. Drucker and Gary Gumpert (New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc: 1996).

  • Heben, Tiffanie. “A Radical Reshaping of the Law: Interpreting and Remedying Street Harassment” (1994).

  • Khazzoom, Loowa. Consequence: Beyond Resisting Rape (2002)

  • Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda. “Street Harassment: The Language of Sexual Terrorism” (1991)

  • Macmillan, Ross, Annette Nierobisz and Sandy Welsh. "Experiencing the Streets: Harassment and Perceptions of Safety Among Women” (2000).

  • Mills, Melinda. "'Are you Talking to Me?' Considering Black Women's Racialized and Gendered Experiences with and Responses or Reactions to Street Harassment from Men." Master's Thesis at Georgia State University (2007).

  • Parsons, Clare Olivia. "Reputation and Public Appearance: The De-Eroticization of the Urban Street." In Voices in the Street: Explorations in Gender, Media, and Public Space. Eds Susan J. Drucker and Gary Gumpert (New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc: 1996).

  • Stanley, Liz and Sue Wise. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Everyday Life. (London: Pandora Press, 1987).

  • Walkowitz, Judith R. "Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London." Representations 62 (Spring 1998): 1-30.