Everyday self‐defence: Hollaback narratives, habitus and resisting street harassment

Abstract

Street harassment is recognized as an ‘everyday’ form of violence against women. Influenced by contemporary sociologies of everyday life, this article examines women responses to street harassment, drawing on over 500 first person narratives submitted to the website of Hollaback London. The narrative structure highlights women’s actions, which (like street harassment) have generally been considered inconsequential. Quantitative content analysis reveals the extent and variety of strategies employed by women, including speaking back, calling on others for help, physically fighting back, walking away and an array of ‘small’, everyday actions and gestures that aim to resist harassment. I argue that these responses comprise everyday self‐defence practice. Furthermore, the notion of narrative habitus is employed to argue that Hollaback narratives do not just describe harassment, but that reading narratives can generate dispositions for self‐defence. Narrative analysis reveals the way that satire is employed to make space for women’s successful self‐defence. I argue that Hollaback narratives do not just offer storylines or scripts for resisting street harassment but foster a style for doing so. Analysis considers the limits to narratively motivated self‐defence. This research demonstrates that, in order to ‘see’ women’s resistance, we need to pay close attention to the everyday as the site of both oppression and moments of liberation.

Runners’ experiences of street harassment in London

“…Staggenborg and Taylor 2005), which in turn protected her from internalising the experience. These finding supports previous research, which also suggests that responding to street harassment can help to reduce its emotional impact (Fileborn and Vera-Gray 2017;Fleetwood 2019). At the same time, calling out harassment can also take a physical and psychological strain, which might explain why the main strategy used by the female and male participants was to ignore the harasser.…”

Online Anti-Rape Activism: Exploring the Politics of the Personal in the Age of Digital Media

“…Blogging has been identified as the earliest and most significant tool for reigniting feminist consciousness in the mid-late 2000s, with the blog Hollaback! being the most well-known and established (since 2005) designed to document experiences of street harassment (Fileborn, 2014(Fileborn, , 2016Fleetwood, 2019;Wånggren, 2016). Shortly thereafter, the blogs Feministing and Jezebel were launched, exposing a new generation of girls and women to feminist ideas and helping to reshape their relationship between the personal and the political (Harris, 2008;Keller, 2012Keller, , 2016Mendes, 2015;Shaw, 2012).…”

From harassment to disappearance: Young women’s feelings of insecurity in public spaces

“…The strategies young women used the most were aimed at avoiding the risk of aggressions [ 81 , 83 – 85 ]. Of these strategies, the main one was changing their appearance, especially to prevent sexual harassment.…”

“…When travelling on the street, they try to be alert, change routes and departure times, do not show belongings and avoid dangerous places. These measures also coincided with the socialization of fearing crime, which led to the restriction of mobility and changes in lifestyle as a form of adaptation [ 10 ] instead of using personal skills for self-defence and to obtain respect in the public space [ 85 ]. The high school girls resorted to changing their appearance and letting others know about their outings to a greater extent than the participants in other groups.…”

“…Changes in lifestyle have been reported due to the need to monitor the surroundings or having to go out in a group [ 24 ]. There is also the development of individual safety efforts [ 85 ] to protect themselves in contexts of vulnerability to aggressions against women, as has been found in previous studies [ 11 ]. The findings also reveal the maintenance of a structure of gender inequality that turns young women into sexual objects, restricts their mobility and autonomy [ 26 ] and causes them continuous emotional distress, mainly through fear and the threat of sexual violence, as in previous studies [ 25 ].…”