Street Harassment as a Public Problem: The Circulation of Policy Frames and Solutions in Europe

Project Information

HarassEU

Grant agreement ID: 101065519

DOI

10.3030/101065519

Project terminated on 14 August 2024

EC signature date 3 October 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2024

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 191 760,00

Coordinated by

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HarassEU (Street Harassment as a Public Problem: The Circulation of Policy Frames and Solutions in Europe)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

When, in the mid-2010s, activists of the transnational Hollaback! movement started working with politicians in the Netherlands to combat a diversity of acts—whistling, sexualized remarks, and insults towards women and LGBTQI+ people, etc.—designated as “street harassment,” they were caught by surprise. Most members had a background in feminist activism and conceived of street harassment as gender-based violence produced by male domination. Most Dutch politicians who were interested in working with them, however, related the issue to immigration and argued that it was caused mainly by youth with a migration background. This difficulty illustrates how supranational governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations face the challenge of developing international initiatives to address an issue, while considering specificities in what is locally understood to be the problem.
The aim of the HarassEU project has been to increase our understanding of how policies and frames travel, and how actors operating on a local, national, and supranational level interact in producing framings and policy solutions. How do problem definitions of street harassment and other social problems come about, how do they travel, and how do they impact how this problem is addressed in practice? This main goal was divided into three objectives, which have guided the project over the last two years:
1. HarassEU empirically examines how supranational, national, and local level organizations in Europe interact in producing and implementing policy frames and solutions.
2. HarassEU forges a novel theoretical framework for conceptualizing how frames and policies emerge and travel, and how policymakers at different levels negotiate the nature of a public problem and how best to address it.
3. The project disseminates research output among academic, professional, and general audiences.
These objectives have been successfully achieved through various work packages. Moreover, the MSCA-grant has allowed me, on a personal level, to further develop a profile as an independent researcher specialized in gender-based violence and policy.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

HarassEU consisted of an ethnography and interview-based study of street harassment policy, carried out in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Following the construction of a systematic database of interviews, ethnography and policy documents, this data was uploaded into Atlas.ti and analyzed and coded using this tool.
Presentations and publications allowed me to make innovative contributions to three fields of scholarship, on 1) how public problems translate into specific policies, 2) the internationalization of policy frames and solutions, and 3) the intertwinement of the politics of gender and race. Moreover, the insights from the project were shared through the organization of a conference on street harassment and gender-based violence policy.
Empirical investigation and theoretical conceptualization of tensions that characterize interactions between organizations operating on different levels provided the basis for policy advice on how to more effectively build transnational coalitions to combat street harassment and other social problems.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The analysis of the data and theoretical work led me to contribute to three key areas of research, notably through publication in leading journals in these fields.
1) Public problems and policy agenda-formation. The project led me to further develop the notion of “apprehension” as a tool for the study of public problems and policy-agenda formation. Analysis of the data showed how the implementation of policies and prevention initiatives on street harassment was informed not only by the goals that policymakers and professionals wanted to accomplish, but also by the kinds of things they wanted to avoid. Notably, the need to avoid implementing policies that stigmatize specific neighborhoods or men of color was emphasized by many representatives of GOs and NGOs. This avoidance behavior has been analyzed in political science scholarship on blame avoidance. However, this body of work tends to reduce such avoidance behavior to the logic of instrumental strategy. The notion of apprehension, further developed within this MSCA-project, emphasizes the moral and emotional dimension this avoidance behavior. This is an innovative theoretical contribution to this field, which has been published in The Sociological Review and Journalism Studies.
2) Globalization and international circulation. Second, this project innovatively contributes to scholarship on the international circulation of policy initiatives. I analyzed how street harassment emerged at the same time as a global issue and as a topic of policy and debate in the different countries under study. At the same time, how this problem was understood locally differed significantly. I theorized how, instead of speaking of the global diffusion of street harassment policy, this topic was differently “appropriated” by local actors. Common understandings of this problem were negotiated in spaces where actors from different national contexts came together. Articles on this subject are currently under review.
3) The politics of gender and ethnicity. A key finding of this project was how policymaking on street harassment was informed by policymakers and professionals’ race frames. Moreover, race and class informed the reception of policy. I developed a theory of how boys and men who are the targets of these policies deflect responsibility for street harassment. They do so in different ways according to their race and class. An original theoretical contribution highlighting these points has been published in Men and Masculinities and other articles on this are currently under review.

In making these contributions, HarassEU successfully achieved its objective of providing a novel theoretical framework to understand how frames emerge and how they travel, and how policymakers at different levels negotiate the nature of a social problem.