Written submission from Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, Durham Law School (SPP0076)

1. Introduction

1.1. This submission is made in my capacity as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Durham Law School, Durham University. I conducted the first full length qualitative study in England on sexual harassment in public in 2014, published in two books: an academic monograph, and a general non-fiction book focused on the impact of men’s sexual harassment on the safety work women and girls carry out in public. I have also published on the methodological problems of researching public sexual harassment, the impact of online sexual harassment, the practices and impacts of public sexual harassment, and the justice needs of targets of public sexual harassment.[1]

2. Executive summary

• Most estimates of the public sexual harassment of women and girls by men sit at 80-90% of women and girls experiencing it at least once over the course of a lifetime.
• Public sexual harassment has a significant impact on women’s freedom of movement and expression, as well as their experience of bodily autonomy, dignity, and equality.
• Research with perpetrators shows that public sexual harassment functions for men as a way of demonstrating masculinity and a form of male bonding.
• There are particular difficulties in using the law to respond to the practices comprising public sexual harassment.
• Changing gender norms that position women’s bodies as incapable and men as entitled to act on women is the key site for Government intervention.

3. Recommendations

• Government should invest in long-term, multi-platform attitudinal change campaigns, including working with media on ‘edutainment’ programming, in order to change gender norms and prevent public sexual harassment.
• Government should fund specialist violence against women organisations to help develop a spiralling programme of age-appropriate lessons to be taught as part of mandated Relationships and Sex education.
• Government should fund a national network of Feminist Self-Defence trainers based in existing specialist sexual violence services.
• Government should ensure secure, sustainable funding for all Rape Crisis Centres.

4. Scale and Impact

4.1. Definitions and measurement: The sexual harassment of women and girls in public places is widespread, however significant methodological problems make quantifying incidence, as well as tracking changes over time, difficult. The lack of agreement on what practices constitute the category renders comparison between studies complicated and also presents problems for survey methodologies. Separating particular intrusive practices into distinct categories does not represent the ways in which these practices are lived and risks normalising practices that are excluded from question construction – a concern that also arises in attempts to respond to public sexual harassment through the law. Combined with this, the mechanisms of minimisation meet with definitional and experiential ambiguity around ‘what counts’, to render precise measurement difficult. This means comparisons between studies are complicated and caution is advised in reporting on scale and extent, with attention paid in particular to definitions used and the categories of inclusion and exclusion.[2]

4.2. International research: With the caveat above stressing the importance of differing definitions across studies, the most common figure appearing in the research evidence across urban sites is 80-90% of women and girls experiencing some form of public sexual harassment over the course of their lives. Polling conducted across a number of countries found that at least 80% of women living in cities in Brazil, India, and Thailand have been subjected to harassment or violence in public.[3] Studies from Australia and Afghanistan, both suggest that 90% of women have experienced physical or verbal harassment in public at least once in their lives, while studies from Canada and Egypt have found that 85% of women have experienced some form of street harassment in just the past year.[4]

4.3. UK specific research: The first England specific survey conducted over 25 years ago found approximately 40% of women in Islington reported having been harassed (defined as being stared at, approached, followed or spoken to) during the survey year.[5] Due to the wide range of practices included and its methodological approach, this study could be appropriate for replication should the inquiry be interested in commissioning research to fill the gaps in evidence. A poll conducted by the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) in 2012 asked women (n=523) who live in London about their experiences of unwanted contact or attention of a sexual nature in public spaces and on public transport over the last year, giving the examples of wolf-whistling, sexual comments, staring and exposure. The findings show clear generational differences: 41%of women aged 18 – 34 had experienced unwanted sexual attention in public spaces compared to 21% of all women surveyed, and high levels of unwanted sexual attention on public transport was reported particularly for women aged 18 – 24 (31%).[6] Inspired by the EVAW study, a 2013 study of women in Coventry used both an online survey (n=193) and follow up interviews with 16 of the survey respondents. It found 61% of women reported experiencing one or more of the following practices: wolf-whistling, groping and unwanted sexual comments.[7] Most recently EVAW commissioned a YouGov poll on public sexual harassment in London. They found that two thirds of women received unwanted sexual attention in public or felt unsafe, and a third have received unwanted physical contact of a sexual nature when in public.[8] These figures substantially increased for younger groups of women, with 85% of young women 18-24 having faced sexual harassment in public spaces and 45% having experienced unwanted sexual touching.

4.4. The need for an intersectional approach: Though men are overwhelming the source of these practices, and women predominantly the targets, recognition of the commonality of street harassment in the lives of most women and girls must be made with an awareness that all women and girls are not harassed in the same way. Social markers such as race, class, generation, and sexuality, situate women in relation to each other, meaning that sexual harassment in public manifests, is experienced, and is responded to in multiple ways, some of which are shared between women and girls and some of which are not. As such sexual harassment requires an intersectional approach to understanding scale, motivations, impact, and response. This need can be seen in a series of short films created by Imkaan’s young women’s group Purple Drum together with EVAW. These films focus the testimonies of black and minoritised ethnic women and girls, including a specific focus on queer women.[9] It can also been seen in the generational differences seen in the findings above. My own research found women singled out adolescence as a key stage in the normalisation of sexual harassment in public, thus suggesting this is a key intervention point.[10] The need for an intersectional approach does not mean that we need a degendered approach or one focused only on differences between women or between groups, but it does highlight the importance of research that seeks to identify scale and needs of specific groups of women, as well as the importance of specialist support.

5. Motivation and Function

5.1. Impact: Far from the trivialisation it is often afforded, the sexual harassment of women and girls in public has a significant impact on women’s freedom of movement and expression, as well as their experience of bodily autonomy, dignity, and equality. A study of over 30,000 women and girls in member countries of the European Union found that over half had restricted their freedom of movement based on the fear of violence against women.[11] A poll conducted in 2016 showed that almost half of all women in the UK take a range of precautionary and diversionary measures while in public space itself.[12] Fear of crime literature has highlighted the impact of public sexual harassment in increasing women’s fear of crime, in particular fear of criminal forms of sexual assault. Studies have also highlighted the impact on women’s outdoor leisure activities, with women and girls limiting their involvement in activities such as hiking or outdoor running due to the threat and reality of sexual harassment. My own research has shown that women conduct a range of strategising and planning in response to the possibility and actuality of men’s intrusion that can be understood as an attempt to find the right amount of panic.[13] The success of this “safety work” is difficult to measure, as success is the absence of a predicted outcome. This means that many women and girls are regularly restricting their movements and expressions in public spaces without experiencing themselves as capable agents. The impact of this is that women’s freedom is frequently limited in order to increase their safety, with women and girls for example deciding not to wear particular forms of clothing or take particular routes home in order to feel safer. The extent of this impact on women’s freedom however is missed in studies and policy responses that focus only on asking women about their feelings of safety or their experiences of harassment as neither are able to capture the extent of the work women and girls do in response to the possibility of sexual harassment in public.

5.2. Perpetrators: The sexual harassment of women and girls in public is both a cause and consequence of gender inequality, something that is particularly revealed in the limited research on perpetrators. A study conducted in 1984 with 60 men who sexually harass women in public found that the majority self-reported their motivation as boredom.[14] A minority reported an intention to antagonise or beneficence, and 20% reported only sexually harassing women and girls in public when with other men. A more recent study also found that men were most likely to report engaging in harassment when in groups, compared to when alone, with the motivations being based on both anonymity and group bonding.[15] A 2002 study found that men's refusal to see their behaviour as harassing can be partially explained through the objectification and attenuated empathy that the production of masculine identities may require,[16] signifying that some forms of harassment and their interpretations may more accurately be seen as acts of ignoring than states of ignorance (of the effects of the behaviour or the law). What the evidence on perpetration suggests is the importance for prevention of challenging codes of masculinity that encourage men to use women’s bodies as vehicles to express their heterosexual masculinity, and codes of femininity that present the bodies of women and girls as something to be acted on (including by for example beauty practices) rather than focusing on their capabilities. Such codes are reproduced through a range of practices and products such as pornography and sexist “banter”, as well as through media representations that see men and boys valued for what they do (such as a focus on men’s sports over women’s), and women and girls valued for how they look (such as the beauty and fashion industries).

6. Legal Response

6.1. Current law: Existing laws are piecemeal and do not in practice cover the majority of what public sexual harassment includes (for example practices such as following, staring, or interruptions such as “hello beautiful” or “cheer-up”.). This is not unique to the UK and significant barriers to both legislation and prosecution exist globally. Many of the problems are based on the requirement for clear definitions in law, as well as context features in public sexual harassment itself such as the fleetingness of the encounter, the anonymity of the perpetrator, and often the ambiguity of the event making it difficult to establish the intent often required of criminal offences. The reasonableness standard is also challenging as, given its function as a mundane extension of norms of gender where men’s bodies “act” and women’s are “acted on”, establishing what a reasonable person would consider harassment is difficult.

6.2. Justice from the victims’ perspective: Increasingly the focus of legislative reform is centered around justice from the victim’s perspective. Taking this approach, research conducted with the targets of public sexual harassment in Australia found that participants perceived a range of shortcomings with the formal justice system as a mechanism for responding to street harassment. Instead, participants advocated for a justice response concerned with transforming cultural and structural norms, in particular gender norms.[17] The key concerns outlined in this study against focusing on legal reforms to respond to public sexual harassment were evidentiary challenges, trivialisation, and a concern about the disproportionate impact on already marginalised groups. Whilst the different legal context and the limits of the survey sample mean this study cannot be directly translated to a UK context, it does suggest that more work needs to be done to determine what the targets of sexual harassment in public want in terms of legislative change before new laws are introduced. Research conducted in the UK has shown that women who have experienced sexual harassment in public support more police (53%), better street lighting (38%), more transport staff (38%) and public awareness campaigns encouraging others to intervene (35%). No women believed this problem should be ignored and no measures taken.[18]

6.3. Hate crime: The addition of misogyny as a hate crime will not address the current failings in law as it does not introduce new legislation itself, rather it is a way of increasing police data for acts that are not currently offences, and enhancing sentencing for existing offences. Similar to problems with the Public Disorder Act, the motivation for the practices comprising public sexual harassment are not those typically associated with hate crime, namely prejudice. Rather, public sexual harassment is a result of men’s entitlement and social norms that position women as something that men can use to demonstrate their heterosexuality and masculinity to each other and to themselves (see Section 4 above). The potential benefits of the hate crime framing is in increasing the reliability of statistics, enabling a way of recording practices that are currently not recorded as crimes, as well as a symbolic marker of the unacceptability of misogyny. However I would be concerned that shifting the frame risks losing the connection to continuum of sexual violence conceptually and to violence against women in terms of policy and law.[19] The benefits on a symbolic level are important, as is the opportunity to increase the evidence base, however framing a problem is central in where we direct attention for finding a solution, and I feel that such a move could be seen as an easy answer to the problem of public sexual harassment rather than the more intricate approach of long-term investment in changing gender norms through education and awareness raising.

7. Support and prevention

7.1. Primary prevention: The difficulties in responding to public sexual harassment through the law highlights the importance of investing in primary prevention focused on changing gender norms. Though the law does have an important symbolic function, the research preventing violence against women and girls shows that what is socially expected of us is a stronger driver of our actions than our individual attitudes or the law.[20] As such, prevention programs that aim to transform gender roles and stereotypes – for example by offering different models of how to be a woman or a man – are better at reducing violence than campaigns which address individual attitudes and behaviours in isolation. This means prevention (both through education and through public awareness campaigns) must move from an individual approach, looking at events as though they are one-offs, ‘isolated incidents’, towards understanding them as individual manifestations of structural problems.

7.2. Attitudinal change: Negative attitudes and behaviours can be changed through investment in long-term attitudinal change campaigns and education, as evidenced in the success of seatbelt campaigns in the 1970’s and drink driving campaigns in Australia. Government should invest in long-term, multi-platform attitudinal change campaigns, including working with media on ‘edutainment’ programming, in order to change gender norms and prevent public sexual harassment. These campaigns should harness the unique ability to address perpetrators in the spaces in which they harass, by using public advertising platforms such as bus shelters and billboards, directing messages to men and boys. They should draw on academic experts as well as the expertise in the specialist violence against women sector, including organisations working specifically with Black and minoritised ethnic women, women with diverse sexualities, and women with disabilities.

7.3. Work with men and boys: Research with men suggests prevention work with men and boys should focus on developing empathy and shifting scripts of masculinity that encourage a demonstration of heterosexuality and the use of women’s bodies as a form of male bonding. Different studies have shown that men are more likely than women to provide socially desirable or gender-affirming responses, than totally candid responses to research questions, suggesting that the desire to conform to hegemonic codes of masculinity is a powerful motivator for men and boys.[21] Government should fund specialist violence against women organisations to help develop a spiralling programme of age-appropriate lessons to be taught as part of mandated Relationships and Sex education. These lessons should include activities to help young men and boys develop and express empathy and vulnerability, as well as activities for young women and girls to experience their bodies as capable and active (such as through feminist self-defence outlined more below). Specific lessons on public sexual harassment, including evidence-based education on its motivations and consequences, should also be part of the mandated curriculum.

7.4. Promising practices: An example of how to address these issues with young people in Key Stages 3 & 4 is ‘Understanding public sexual harassment’, a series of four evidence-based lesson plans developed by experts in sexual violence prevention based on my research of women’s experiences in the UK and the work of Dr. Maria Garner on men and masculinities.[22] The sessions were developed as part of a project funded by the ESRC and Durham Law School which used drama to engage young people in identifying and challenging sexual harassment in public. An evaluation of the project is currently underway and a more detailed write up is available on request. Education should also aim to engage young people as active bystanders in relation to sexual harassment. A project is currently underway across four EU countries, including the UK, piloting a specialist program developed for this purpose.[23]

7.5.  Feminist self-defence: In order to address the ways the experience of sexual harassment in public teaches women and girls to take up less space, as well as combat a society that focuses on women’s bodies as ‘done to not doing’, government should fund a national network of Feminist Self-Defence trainers based in existing specialist sexual violence services. A considerable body of research now exists showing that feminist self-defence has positive consequences for women including increased self-esteem, capability, assertiveness, physical skills, and a reduction women’s fear of crime.[24] Studies on effective rape prevention have also shown that feminist self-defence is positively associated with rape avoidance, brings no increased risk of physical injury, and can form part of a support process in how it helps to reduce the levels of trauma symptoms experienced in the aftermath of an assault.[25] A review of the literature on women’s self-defence found that contrary to the claim that self-defence removes the responsibility from the men who are the cause of the problem and locates the solution – again – with women, feminist self-defence in fact explicitly includes a critical analysis of violence against women which holds perpetrators accountable and challenges victim blame.[26] A government-funded program in New Zealand focuses on school-aged girls delivering their training to almost 10,000 girls each year, as well as delivering to women in communities that are specifically targeted for sexual violence due to geographic, cultural and/or disability-related isolation. A recent evaluation of the project found that across women and girls of all ages there were self-reported increases in self-esteem and feeling strong, as well as significant improvements in the confidence they had in their ability to use their skills to defend themselves. Many of these changes remained consistent years after the intervention had been delivered, a key marker of success for primary prevention.[27] A similar programme should be introduced here as part of relationships and sex education.

7.6. Specialist support: Existing specialist sexual violence organisations such as Rape Crisis Centres, work with experiences of sexual violence across the continuum. As such there is support available for women and girls who experience public sexual harassment. These centres are increasingly operating at capacity and are underfunded. Government should ensure secure, sustainable funding for all Rape Crisis Centres, including funding to not only continue but to develop their services in response to need, such as the development of specialist prevention work directed at public sexual harassment.

March 2018