Cat-Calls and Culpability: Investigating the Frequency and Functions of Stranger Harassment

Street Harassment Interpretations: An Exploration of the Intersection of Gender and Race/Ethnicity, and Mediator Variables

How does the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity influence street harassment interpretations? What roles do attitudes and past experience play in these relationships? We examined these questions through an exploratory study of 163 Californian respondents and four hypothetical scenarios: being told to smile, being called "sexy," hearing kissing noises, and being followed. Our findings revealed Black, Latina, and White women were more critical of these behaviors than men in their race/ethnic group. Women across all race/ethnicities interpreted the scenarios similarly with minor nuances. Street harassment views were strongly associated with prior experiences instigating street harassment and support for harassment myths.

From "Ghettoization" to a Field of Its Own: A Comprehensive Review of Street Harassment Research

Street harassment represents one of the most pervasive forms of sexual violence. While it is commonly understood as a gender-based harm, it also intersects with racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and other forms of abuse. Although it is rarely responded to through government policy, research illustrates that street harassment can have profoundly negative impacts of those who experience it. This article provides a comprehensive review of the current "state of the field" of street harassment research. We undertook two extensive searches of the EBSCO Discovery database in 2015 and 2020, followed by the use of reference snowballing and a Google Scholar search in order to triangulate results. Studies included in the sample were published in English, peer-reviewed and centrally focused on street harassment. Dissertations and nongovernmental organization reports were also included due to the small number of studies in this field. One hundred eighty-two sources were included in the final sample. Findings show that publications on this topic have increased substantially across the two reviews. We provide a thematic overview of key research findings to date and argue throughout that current research suffers from conceptual and typological slippage and does not consistently take into account the need for an intersectional analysis. We close with suggestions for future directions in research and practice, given the emergent nature of the field.

The Reproducibility Movement in Psychology: Does Researcher Gender Affect How People Perceive Scientists With a Failed Replication?

The reproducibility movement in psychology has resulted in numerous highly publicized instances of replication failures. The goal of the present work was to investigate people’s reactions to a psychology replication failure vs. success, and to test whether a failure elicits harsher reactions when the researcher is a woman vs. a man. We examined these questions in a pre-registered experiment with a working adult sample, a conceptual replication of that experiment with a student sample, and an analysis of data compiled and posted by a psychology researcher on their public weblog with the stated goal to improve research replicability by rank-ordering psychology researchers by their “estimated false discovery risk.” Participants in the experiments were randomly assigned to read a news article describing a successful vs. failed replication attempt of original work from a male vs. female psychological scientist, and then completed measures of researcher competence, likability, integrity, perceptions of the research, and behavioral intentions for future interactions with the researcher. In both working adult and student samples, analyses consistently yielded large main effects of replication outcome, but no interaction with researcher gender. Likewise, the coding of weblog data posted in July 2021 indicated that 66.3% of the researchers scrutinized were men and 33.8% were women, and their rank-ordering was not correlated with researcher gender. The lack of support for our pre-registered gender-replication hypothesis is, at first glance, encouraging for women researchers’ careers; however, the substantial effect sizes we observed for replication outcome underscore the tremendous negative impact the reproducibility movement can have on psychologists’ careers. We discuss the implications of such negative perceptions and the possible downstream consequences for women in the field that are essential for future study.

Managers' and Leaders' Perceptions of Sexual and Gender-Based Public Harassment in the Veterans Health Administration

PURPOSE

Managers and leaders have a critical role to play in sexual and gender-based harassment prevention within organizations. Although the Veterans Health Administration has committed to eliminating harassment through national directives and training programs, it is unclear how aware local-level managers and leaders are about public harassment at their facilities and how they perceive sexual and gender-based harassment. We examined middle managers' and leaders' views about whether harassment is perceived as a problem locally, and what policies and procedures (if any) are in place to address public harassment.

METHODS

We conducted 69 semistructured telephone interviews with middle managers and facility leaders before implementation of an evidence-based quality improvement project designed to improve delivery of comprehensive women's health care. Transcripts were coded using the constant comparative method and analyzed for overarching themes.

RESULTS

Perceptions of the prevalence of sexual and gender-based public harassment varied among middle managers and leaders. A little more than one-half of respondents were unaware of facility-level policies and procedures to address public harassment between patients. To decrease patient-to-patient harassment, both groups generally supported the creation of separate clinical spaces for women. However, middle managers also stated that education was needed to change patient harassing behavior, which they tied to male military culture.

CONCLUSIONS

Aligning divergent perspectives of what constitutes sexual and gender-based harassment and how to address it is a necessary step towards tackling harassment at the local level. Managers and leaders should continue to assess environments of care and share findings widely among employees and leadership to improve awareness and inform a unified response.

The Harasser’s Toolbox: Investigating the Role of Mobility in Street Harassment

This study investigates the role of physical mobility in street harassment by analyzing a stratified random sample of 334 cases posted to Hollaback!, an online community documenting experiences of street harassment. Findings suggest that harassers utilize means of transportation as weapons to inflict or threaten physical harm, to escape or preserve anonymity, and to pursue targets and as a hunting ground for potential targets. By identifying the mechanisms of street harassment, we theorize how harassers negotiate mobility—particular types of mobility, especially that which is enabled by public transportation and owner vehicles—to gain advantage over targets of harassment.

Intersectional harassment and deviant embodiment among Autistic adults: (dis)ability, gender and sexuality

Harassment scholarship increasingly attends to the intersectional nature of harassment and its function within systems of domination. However, little of this work includes disability. In-depth interviews with 24 adults on the autism spectrum in the USA demonstrate the intersections of gender, sexuality and (dis)ability in the construction of deviant embodiments as targets for harassment. These intersections also shape how participants made sense of these experiences of violence. Participants' disability characteristics were often read as gender or sexual variance, with harassers relying on sexist and heterosexist constructs to frighten, demean or humiliate them for disability characteristics. Participant experiences demonstrate the cisgender basis of 'able-bodied' identity as well as the 'able-bodied' basis of cisgender and heterosexual identities and experiences. The interdependency of gender, sexuality and (dis)ability embodiment point to how it is critical for scholars and activists to account for the role of gender and heterosexist harassment in ableist oppression and disability harassment in (hetero)sexist oppression, as well as the limits of current US law enforcement structures in providing redress for harassment.

The Ripple Effects of Stranger Harassment on Objectification of Self and Others

Despite the frequency and negative consequences of stranger harassment, only a scant number of studies have explicitly examined stranger harassment and its consequences through the lens of objectification theory. The current study introduced and tested a mediation model in which women’s experiences of stranger harassment may lead to self-objectification, which in turn may lead to objectification of other people. To examine this model, undergraduate women ( N = 501) completed measures of stranger harassment (including the verbal harassment and sexual pressure subscales of the Stranger Harassment Index), body surveillance, and objectification of other women and men. Consistent with hypotheses, significant positive correlations emerged among total stranger harassment, verbal harassment, sexual pressure, body surveillance, and other-objectification of women. Other-objectification of men showed a similar pattern of results, with the exception of being unrelated to total stranger harassment and sexual pressure. Consistent with the proposed model, body surveillance was a significant mediator of the relation between total stranger harassment and other-objectification of both women and men, as well as the relation between verbal harassment and other-objectification of both women and men. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as future directions for research on stranger harassment, are discussed.