Fiona Vera Gray

Research on violence against women tends to focus on topics such as sexual assault and intimate partner violence, arguably to the detriment of investigating men’s violence and intrusion in women’s everyday lives. The reality and possibility of the routine intrusions women experience from men in public space – from unwanted comments, to flashing, following and frottage – are frequently unaddressed in research, as well as in theoretical and policy-based responses to violence against women. Often at their height during women’s adolescence, such practices are commonly dismissed as trivial, relatively harmless expressions of free speech too subjective to be legislated against. Based on original empirical research, this book is the first of its kind to conduct a feminist phenomenological analysis of the experience for women of men’s stranger intrusions in public spaces. It suggests that intrusion from unknown men is a fundamental factor in how women understand and enact their embodied selfhood.

The practices comprising the analytic category of street harassment are rarely responded to through either criminal or restorative justice approaches, and the possibilities for transformative justice have to date not been considered. In this article we advocate for a victim-centred justice response to street harassment, specifically examining the potential for transformative justice to function in this way. Drawing on data from a recent Australian study, we examine participants’ understandings of justice and desired justice responses to street harassment. Participants’ responses drew attention to a range of perceived shortcomings of the formal justice system as a mechanism for responding to street harassment. Instead, participants advocated for a justice response concerned with transforming cultural and structural norms, in particular gender norms. We end in an examination of the limitations of transformative justice, looking to recent work on “kaleidoscopic justice” as a way of transforming common conceptions of justice itself.

Given the growing popularity of online methods for researchers and the increasing awareness of the levels of harassment and abuse directed at women online—especially women expressing feminist views—it is critical that we address the implications of online abuse for feminist researchers. Focussing on an often hidden yet significant part of our methodological decisions and recruitment, this paper details the online abuse levelled by men's rights activists against a research project on women's experiences of men's stranger intrusions in public space. It argues for the need to locate such experiences within a violence-against-women frame, extending the concept of a continuum of sexual violence. Such an extension renders visible the added labour of ‘safety work’, which forms an invisible backdrop to the methodological decisions of many feminist researchers.

A philosophical frame for violence against women and girls creates unique opportunities to deepen our understanding of the embodied consequences of men’s violence. Using the seemingly innocuous example of being told to “cheer up” or “smile”, we draw on Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon’s work on recognition to suggest that a phenomenological approach to sexual violence may help to voice previously inarticulable harms. The dual frame of Beauvoir and Fanon also highlights the need for philosophical work on sexual violence to take account of the insights of intersectionality.