Focusing on real-life accounts, the book examines women's experiences and the societal tendency to blame victims. It highlights the extensive efforts women make to navigate and prevent sexual violence in public spaces, drawing from the author's original research. By addressing these critical issues, it aims to shift perspectives on victimization and enhance understanding of the challenges women face.
Exploring the final taboo surrounding women's experiences, this book delves into the complexities of female identity and societal expectations. It highlights the importance of breaking silence on sensitive topics that remain unaddressed, encouraging open dialogue and empowerment. Through personal stories and cultural analysis, it challenges norms and invites readers to confront their own beliefs about womanhood, ultimately aiming to foster understanding and change in a modern context.
A critical analysis of street harassment
Focusing on women's experiences, this groundbreaking work employs feminist phenomenological analysis to explore how men's stranger intrusions in public spaces impact women's perceptions of their own embodied selfhood. Through original empirical research, it reveals that these intrusions significantly shape women's understanding of their identities and interactions in society.
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. This book is essential reading for academics and students involved in the study of violence against women, feminist philosophy, applied sociology, feminist criminology and gender studies.