Adolescent girls' experiences of street harassment: emotions, comments, impact, actions and the law

The prevalence and range of street harassment(SH) incidents as experienced by adolescents is an understudied area. Street harassmentcan be defined as harassment behaviour in public places occurring both on-street (Wanggren, 2016; Logan, 2015; Vera-Gray, 2015; Fileborn, 2014) and when using public transport (Gekoski et al., 2017, Logan, 2015). SH includes a range of behaviours such as, "Threat of physical harm, staring or watching, shouting, following or stalking, indecent proposals, name calling and verbal abuse," (Deakin, 2006, p.378). SH can also be seen as an act of violence (Gardner, 1995), a public health issue (Bucchianeriet al., 2014), and a precursor to violent crime (Logan, 2015). The advantage of a multi-disciplinary team is to examine girls' SH experiences from different perspectives. This is because girls' behaviour, wellbeing, coping strategies, safety, ability to learn and behaviour can all be affected when out and about in public. In this chapter, a team of academics from sociology, psychology, linguistics, law and education present a multidisciplinary perspective on a study undertaken with three secondary schools in the UK. Both quantitative and qualitative data of adolescent girls is analysed to discuss the impact of SH experiences on emotions, wellbeing, safety, coping strategies and ability to learn. The study included adolescent boys, but the focus of this chapter is on the SH experiences of adolescent girls. Some mention is made of the findings about boys' experiences to discuss how girls' SH experiences appear distinctive. The chapter discusses findings relating to adolescent girls' emotions when experiencing SH and the comments they make about these experiences including what actions they can take. We also consider what the impact of SH on their education, and implications for how far SH is covered by UK law.