Street Harassment: Carceral versus Abolitionist Solutions
by Tina Sikka
Green square with the words ‘Tina on Sexual Harrassment Laws’ light yellow text with some graphic in light pink.
Over the past few years, moves to criminalise street harassment have come hard and fast. Post-COVID-19 lockdowns, the French government acted before the British government by instituting an ‘anti-catcalling’ law (other countries have similar legal frameworks including France, Canada, Argentina, Belgian and Spain). Under this law, the accused would be cited/sanctioned on the spot (so not a felony) rather than being charged (which would require a longer investigation and/or trial). Similarly, here in the UK, the 2023 amendment to the Protection from Sex-Based Harassment in Public Bill (once in force) will result in the institution of harsher sentences for sexual harassment for such acts as staring, making sexual comments, pressing against someone, following them closely, and obstructing their path. Overwhelmingly, targets of street harassment tend to self-identify as female (whereas the harassers are most often male), they do not know their targets personally, the encounter takes place in public and is face-to-face, and the content tends to be ”…degrading, objectifying, humiliating, and frequently threatening in nature.”
Intuitively, it may feel like laws and regulations to stop individual acts of gendered and racialised sexual harassment is the morally correct and reasonable way forward. Liberal feminists for decades have defaulted to this conclusion despite evidence to the contrary. Arguments for criminalisation include the hope that the awareness and education that accompanies its rollout will produce cultural change around gender norms, objectification, rape culture, and misogyny, that it will lead to the identification of verbal harassment as harmful, result in better police training; and, lead to the reclamation of public space and the recovery of privacy.
In 2022 a university student approached me, ‘as a noted feminist,’ to add a statement of support to a student and community petition aimed at supporting the criminalisation of street harassment. After politely declining, explaining that this was a carceral approach I was uncomfortable with (and adding that I was an abolitionist), I began to think more carefully about how the intersection between feminism, gender-based violence (often historically conflated with sex work and pornography), and criminalisation had appeared again, albeit in a different guise. At the same time, I found it curious that the descriptor feminist was used by the student to assume alignment with carceral overreach as, for myself, a feminist position is inherently anti-carceral and would, as bell hooks argues, aim to end domination in all its forms. I was also struck by how media outlets had been discussing street harassment – especially ‘post-pandemic.’ Significantly, while some outlets reported a decline in street harassment (likely due to there being fewer people in public spaces to harass and do the harassing), others reported a marked uptick. Those that reported an increase did so with gusto, calling on bystanders to report, for ‘cat-calling’ to be ‘banned’ and relying heavily on moving personal stories grounded in lived experience.
It remains the case, however, that like other forms of criminalisation, there are significant reasons against taking this course of action. Below, I go over some of these from a legal and cultural perspective before using the Abolitionist Futures resource on ‘Addressing Gender-Based Violence’ to think through overlooked problems around its implementation. None of this, to be clear, is meant to trivialise, undermine, challenge, or delimit gendered and sexualised public harassment. The objective is to abolish gender-based violence in all of its forms. What makes our approach different is that we see the criminal legal system as overwhelming harm producing – “as a repressive system… and structure….that thrive[s] on racism, heteropatriarchy, and class hierarchies” which continue to “hold us captive to the past, tether us to capitalism in so many ways, and prevent us from collectively envisioning socialist futures.”
First, criminalisation runs up against arguments around ideal versus real-life experience. For example, it is assumed that an officer will always be there to take a complaint or that they will be able to track down the accused after the fact. As we know, this is not always the case. Also important is that criminalisation relies on assumptions about shared interpretation which presumes that cases will not become mired in arguments about, for instance, the difference between harassment and a ‘compliment’ – which brings up disagreements around free speech. Finally, criminalisation does little to address the root causes of gender-based sexual harassment (I return to this below). This is particularly problematic when connected to the law’s requirements around establishing intention (which is notoriously difficult to do), resolving different interpretations (on what grounds?), adjudicating grey areas, and sifting through uncertainties around proportionality vis a vis harm. Not to mention the overlooked impact of accumulated harms – since the law cannot account for the harms associated with street harassment over time. It is also the case that this form of criminalisation does not reflect the role of race and class – particularly since racialised and socio-economically disadvantaged men are more likely to be caught up in complaints thus targeting people of colour disproportionately. Racialised women are also less likely to come forward due to distrust of police and lack of confidence in the criminal legal system. The uneven application of the law to the harassment of trans and nonbinary individuals as well as sex workers is also an important concern given the police’s track record in this area.
It is thus important to place this law firmly in the category of a non-reformist reform. This means that it will inevitably lead to placing more police in public spaces thereby expanding their powers and leading to little in the way of tangible, structural change. It also introduces a new offence perpetuating the manufactured link between criminalisation and public safety and diverting much-needed resources away from public safety investments. Even the most cursory look at rates of reported and unreported GBV illustrates that increasing punitive punishments does not lead to safer communities. It is also the case that the lengthier punishments this carceral reform will introduce enhance police power, exacerbate inequalities (by disproportionately impacting marginalised groups), and expose those incarcerated to physical violence and mental harm. Finally, it is well evidenced that zero-tolerance reforms enhance the surveillant powers of the police, target racialised and socio-economically disadvantaged groups through over-policing specifically, and can lead to social stigmatisation.
Conversely, abolitionist strategies, if given support, would be able to address some of the complex root causes of sexualised street harassment which include misogyny, patriarchy, economic inequality, and intersecting forms of marginalisation. It is these structures and norms that render some women more vulnerable to harm, particularly since that harm reflects entrenched norms emerging out of histories of “heterosexism, colonialism, and slavery.” While not a panacea, these strategies work to address the immediate needs of women being harmed and set the stage for transformative change. Assembling, training, and supporting night-time safety programs and non-police crisis teams – both of which would be equipped with violence de-escalation techniques – would divert resources away from the police and into public safety thereby strengthening community prevention and reducing harm by funnelling funds into those institutions (e.g. health care and education) making them better equipped to engender root and branch change. Built into abolitionist strategies are tangible steps needed to construct an ecosystem rooted in: 1. mutual aid; 2. principles of transformative justice oriented to community accountability, safety, and harm prevention; 3. preventative education capable of addressing “wider social issues, rather than working to narrow government agendas;” 4. meeting human needs like housing; and 5. attending to basic socio-cultural and economic justice.
Thus, for all people who identify as women to feel safe in public spaces, we must address the conditions that give rise to harassment. A carceral approach will simply not be effective. Non-oppressive, care-centred, and reparative methods of challenging street harassment need to be given space – particularly since the very people who experience said harassment are consistently unsatisfied with current responses. An abolitionist approach to street harassment is aimed at attending to the conditions under which street harassment has become trivialised and/or addressed in discriminatory, disproportionate, and superficial ways. Concretely, what is needed is for us to explore “Alternative options for intervention and redress within transformative justice frameworks include providing support to survivors, developing community accountability protocols, and doing prevention work that challenges everyday acts of racial and gender injustice.” Setting the conditions for this work is precisely what projects and resources like the Addressing Gender-Based Violence toolkit aims to do.
Tina is Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice in the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University.