Handing out fines won’t make street harassment go away
As street harassment has garnered more attention in countries around the world, governments have increasingly turned to criminalisation as a way of curbing its prevalence in our societies. In this blog post, our co-founder Annelise Lecordier explores why this approach isn’t the be-all end-all solution it is often upheld as - resulting instead in some very serious shortfalls when it comes to addressing street harassment.
For the longest time, street harassment has been an issue that very few people talked about. Despite happening to so many of us throughout our lifetimes, the default stance was always to brush it off, push down the uncomfortableness and just move on with our day – no matter how upsetting the incident might have been. If anything, the fact that they were so common did us a disservice as it normalised street harassment straight out of conversation. No matter how uncomfortable or unsafe these incidents might have made us feel, the thought process was always ‘well if it’s happening to everyone else then it must be normal, right?’.
It took a wave of feminist advocacy and research to bring the issue into public conversation, utilising technology and the internet to share experiences and break through the silence that dominated around the topic. These online discussions and videos like the one created by Hollaback! helped garner attention to the issue while providing a very real, if jarring, glance at what existing on the streets feels like for so many of us. We are now at a point where more and more people are being sensitised to the true harm of street harassment and demanding more action to address this.
While response has generally been slow, a number of jurisdictions have recently passed legislation aimed at tackling this issue. These, however, have largely centred around approaches that seek to criminalise street harassment. France, for example, now allows for on-the-spot fines to be issued to perpetrators of street harassment while the Philippines has introduced legislation that criminalises the sexual harassment of women in public spaces, carrying with it a penalty of fines or up to a month of jail time. Similar approaches have also been adopted in New York, Belgium and Portugal. Many have regarded these legislative changes as an important turning point in the way street harassment is viewed and addressed in the public sphere. By having specific legislations that criminalise street harassment, the hope is that these laws will send a strong message of community intolerance towards these acts with the penalties attached to them acting as both a deterrent and a way to shift the onus back on perpetrators.
The reality, however, is much different.
Often the first hurdle when developing these types of legislation lies in defining the criminal act itself. With something as variable and amorphous as street harassment, the trick lies in finding something specific enough to actually address the issue while leaving enough room for discretion. Towing that line can often be hard. When looking at legislation passed in the state of New York, for example, most of the incidents seen in the now famous Hollaback! video would not meet the standard outlined by it. By requiring that the victim be repeatedly followed in public, feel a reasonable fear of injury or establish that the intent of the perpetrator was to harass, annoy or alarm, the law creates an incredibly high standard that can often be hard to meet. This not only limits the applicability of the law and potential to provide redress but, more problematically, by establishing a clear black-and-white definition of what types of street harassment can be deemed ‘legitimate’, it implicitly sends the message that if an experience doesn’t legally amount to harassment then it should be considered ok. Additionally, even with these legislations in place, research has shown that people often continue to not take these types of complaints seriously with the criminal justice system being unwilling to use their limited resources to address them. Add to this a high standard to establishing guilt within a system that is not built to address the more fleeting nature of this type of crime and you end up with a law with limited applicability that victims are often reluctant to utilise. Besides, by focusing on individual incidents of street harassment at the expense of a community-centred lens, these laws also fail to address the cumulative nature of street harassment while doing little to tackle the structural inequalities and power differentials that make this type of behaviour possible in the first place. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the very basic shortfall that many of these laws focus purely on gendered forms of street harassment, ignoring the many other forms of structural oppression that can result in harassment - from racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia to homophobia, transphobia and ableism, to name just a few.
While some might view these shortfalls as a reason to further criminalise street harassment, we believe that doing so would only result in more problematic outcomes for those most likely to be targeted by them. When looking at laws like France’s that seek to expedite proceedings by reducing the amount of evidence required and implementing on-the-spot fines, we can see that a huge amount of discretion becomes afforded to police officers when determining whether street harassment has occurred. For many communities who already have strained relationships with law enforcement agencies, there is always a concern that the police will target and take disproportionate action against them. As movements like Black Lives Matter have been highlighted for years, communities of colour, and particularly Black and Indigenous communities, are already policed at much higher rates than any other population. Introducing laws like these ones could result in further unfair targeting and more negative outcomes for these communities in the name of very limited positive outcomes for victims of street harassment. Similar concerns also apply to other marginalised or otherwise vulnerable groups that may not always have positive interactions with the police, such as people with mental impairments that may be contributing to the incident but aren't taken into consideration by police officers. On the flip side of this, these laws would also force individuals who are similarly wary of interactions with the police to resort to the criminal justice system if they want any sort of redress for the harassment they have been subjected to. Since we know that individuals from marginalised communities are more likely to face street harassment in the first place, creating a system that forces them to interact with a criminal justice system that might not take them seriously or may even re-traumatise them does little to further their rights and ability to enjoy public spaces free of the fear of harassment.
At It’s Not A Compliment, we believe that progress on this issue should not be achieved at the expense of already marginalised communities. That’s why we don’t believe in a criminalisation approach to tackling street harassment, favouring instead a model of community responsibility centred around education and cultural change.
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Annelise Lecordier is the Co-Founder and Head of Communications and Policy at It’s Not A Compliment. Formed out of Democracy in Colour’s Create Change Fellowship, the campaign focuses on achieving street justice for all. An International Relations graduate originally from Mauritius, Annelise is passionate about human rights, social equality and fighting structural oppression through a strong intersectional, post-colonial feminist lens.
