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.
