Street harassment

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Street harassment, also known as catcalling, is a form of sexual harassment that takes place in public spaces, often in urban areas. Street harassment is usually harassment of women by men, though the reverse does occur, it rarely carries with it the implicit threat of rape or assault that is more often present in male on female harassment. [1]

In the United States, the most common forms of street harassment include: making sexually explicit comments or noises^{[citation needed]}

Although every incident of street harassment is unique, in descriptions from victims, a number of common themes recur. The "typical" pattern of events goes as follows:

The victim is in a public place. The victim is not engaging in any activity that could reasonably be construed as an attempt to attract attention. The harasser is alone or in the company of other person. The harasser tries to engage the attention of the victim in some way (for example by staring, whistling, shouting, or beeping the horn of a vehicle) The harasser may follow with an offensive comment, addressed directly to the victim or to other people but within earshot of the victim. The victim's reaction, which will vary depending on circumstances, will not be positive. The harasser may continue or escalate the inappropriate behaviour despite the lack of encouragement or express disapproval of the victim.^{[citation needed]}

1 Defense
2 Resistance
3 Multiculturalism as a Confounding Factor
4 For further reading
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Defense

People who perform "street harassment" may attempt to defend their behavior by blaming the harassment target.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Resistance

Over time, initiatives such as Firegrl, The Street Harassment Project, and HollabackNYC have developed to call attention to and combat street harassment.

With the advent of Internet and cameraphone technology, photographing and disseminating pictures of street harassers has emerged as one popular intervention. In the summer of 2005, Thao Nguyen used her cell phone camera to photograph a man who masturbated in front of her in a New York subway car. That photograph, which she posted online on a photoblog, was subsequently published by numerous New York daily newspapers and circulated on the Internet, ultimately shaming the man into turning himself in. [2] Today, projects such as The Blank Noise Project and Hollaback make use of this strategy in combating street harassment.

[edit] Multiculturalism as a Confounding Factor

Due to the pervasiveness of female objectification varying widely by culture, the American ideal of multiculturalism has made it taboo to speak out against culturally indoctrinated forms of misogyny within various ethnic communities and subcultures (e.g., Hispanic cultures promote degrading street harassment with little public outcry about the problem for fear of appearing xenophobic/having internalized degrading women as normative behavior).