An Analysis of the Phenomenon of Physical Street Harassment with an Ethnographic Approach

 Sexual harassment is a form of sexual violence and discrimination against women that increases social insecurity and fear of women in a society and so, reduces the individual liberties and social participation of women. In this regard, the present study aims to investigate the abnormal phenomenon in the society that commonly referred as ‘street harassment’. The starting point of this study is to distinguish between two types of street harassment, namely verbal and physical harassment, emphasizing the similarity of physical harassment with the phenomenon of ‘Sexual Rape’ and more damaging effects of such harassment on insecurity and relaxation about people in the society, especially women. In this study, we attempted to obtain a fairly accurate description of ‘physical street harassments’ using the ethnographic approach.  

In this research, we used various techniques, including field observations and in-depth and semi-in-depth interviews with different stakeholder groups for collecting data, and analyzed this data using the qualitative content analysis method. In other words, this study has been carried out by the ethnography method in which collecting data from 45 interviews and 44 field observations have been analyzed using qualitative content analysis method. The mentioned sample size for observations and interviews determined based on theoretical saturation. Interviews were conducted with several groups including victims of physical street harassment (women), local informants stationed in the study fields, the social control agents in the area, as well as street harassers themselves. Also, field observations have been take place by visiting places in Tehran that is prone to such harassment and an abundance of these behaviors such as Galobandak intersection, Baazar and markets in this area, metro stations of 15 Khordad, Imam Khomeini and Darvazeh Shemiran. 

Overall findings of this ethnographic study may be summarized in five sentences: 1) the phenomenon of street harassment is an arena in which a series of individual actors interact, 2) entering this arena has certain rituals, 3) actions of the actors in this arena take place in specific spatial territories, and they use a specific time calendar for their actions, 4) interactions between actors in this arena follows certain rules of behavior, and finally, 5) the actors have shared experiences in the field that distinguish them from other social actors. According to the results, physical harassers were subjected to two types of ‘Opportunists’ and ‘Hard Cores’, and victims are categorized into five types, including ‘aggressor protestor’, ‘respectable protestor’, ‘conservative protestor’, ‘passive protester’, and ‘incurious victim’ (actors' faces). Physical harassers enter a realm of interactions through a process, from searching for a way to satisfy instincts to becoming a hard core harasser (membership rituals), in which their ‘sexual acts’ and ‘gender behaviors’ in public places confronted with responses from victims as ‘Apparent Reaction’, ‘Implicit Reaction’, ‘Escape from Position’, ‘Passivity’ and ‘Incuriosity’ (Rules of Action). In this context, the utility of space and time has a different meaning and is defined on the basis of mixing and crowding (Utility of Time and Place). The shared experiences of the actors work as a linking and identifying factor in the field (Shared Experiences). So, we found five very important issues concerning street harassment, namely: 'actors', 'membership rituals', 'Rules of Action', 'Utility of Time and Place', and 'Shared Experiences'. Now if we go a little further and look at the above five categories at a higher level of abstraction, we will come to a more general concept which is the central theme of the ethnographic study: the ‘Subculture of Sexual Harassment’. The categories discovered in this research suggest that we are dealing with a deviant subculture that is created, nurtured and constantly reproducing itself under the skin of the city. Thus, the findings of this study as a whole suggested that street physical harassment have a culture of its own, with elements, rules, meanings, and behaviors embedded within the same culture and is reproduced in the same space by its actors. Membership in this subculture gives specific behavioral and attitudinal features to its actors and distinguishes them from other social actors, and it is these shared behavioral characteristics that sustain life of the subculture. These findings, although inductively based on the extraction of partial concepts and categories from the field data, have tangible links with sociological theories. Theoretical concepts such as Stigma, Labeling, Secondary Deviation, Urban Defenseless Spaces, Relative Deprivation, and Flaneur have provided a theoretical and conceptual support for the findings of the study.