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Journalism of Courage
On Friday (November 9) the British government announced that it was backing legislation to criminalise public sexual harassment, joining a handful of countries that have made specific offences such as catcalling punishable by law. The bill would introduce harsher penalties for those who deliberately harass someone in public because of the victim’s sex, Britain’s Home Office said in a statement, with the maximum sentence increasing from six months to two years.
The Indian Express takes a look at the problem of “street harassment”, what this move means, and some learnings from France where such a move is already in place.
Public sexual harassment is rampant across the world. While it may impact men and boys, it disproportionately affects women. In 2016, ActionAid found that 79% of women living in cities in India, 86% in Thailand, and 89% in Brazil have been subjected to harassment or violence in public, as had 75% of women in London, UK.
Notably, Gallup data from surveys in 143 countries in 2011 showed that men were considerably more likely than women to say they felt safe walking alone at night in their communities.
In the UK specifically, a 2022 YouGov poll showed that 62% women have been catcalled at some point of time in their lives, with 43% having faced groping or unwanted touching. With such experiences, women often feel unsafe and make various decisions accordingly: from deciding not to take a stroll out at night to taking detours to avoid “shady” areas.
Laws in most countries are inadequate to deal with public sexual harassment.
Also, in most countries, gaps in the legal frameworks and flippant attitudes towards the issue make it difficult for women to report and get redressals for such crimes. Plan International UK, a children’s charity, released a report in 2018 stating that in their sample of women surveyed, 66% had experienced unwanted sexual attention, grabbing or groping, or indecent exposure. But 42% of them didn’t tell anyone, let alone the police.
Emily Reynolds wrote in The Guardian in 2019, “At the heart of this issue is the assumption most women make about street harassment — that it is something that is inevitably going to happen to them.” But it should not.
While often seeming overtly harmless, such “casual harassment” does not exist in isolation: rather it is in the same category of far more serious sexual offences, only differing in degree. Reynolds wrote, “If women aren’t believed when they tell someone they’ve been catcalled — an occurrence we must grimly categorise as “everyday” — then why would they have faith that more serious offences are going to be taken seriously?”
Further, as the rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 near her home in South London suggested, it does not take much for “street harassment” to turn into something far more serious.
In a statement, the UK Home Office said: “After careful consideration, the government is supporting legislation brought forward by Greg Clark MP which introduces harsher sentences if someone who deliberately harasses, alarms, or distresses someone in a public place does so because of the victim’s sex, with the maximum sentence increasing from six months to two years.”
The law identifies particular crimes which are not currently defined within the legal framework in Britain, and to give the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) the legal provisions under which to pursue such cases. Some of the offences that will henceforth be criminalised are:
• Deliberately walking closely behind someone as they walk home at night;
• Making obscene or aggressive comments towards a person;
• Making obscene or offensive gestures towards a person;
• Obstructing a person’s path;
• Driving or riding a vehicle slowly near to a person making a journey
Several other European countries, including Belgium, France, and Portugal, have already criminalised verbal or public sexual harassment with spot fines and jail time.
In 2018, France enacted its revolutionary street harassment law which allows law enforcement officers to sanction perpetrators on the spot, instead of leaving victims to wait for a long and arduous trial after the fact.
The “sexist outrage” law allows for fines of between €90 and €750 for behaviour such as cat-calling, obscene gestures, degrading comments on physical appearance, sexual propositions, or following a person insistently in the street. The fines can reach €1,500 for repeat offences or for offences involving a minor younger than 15, abuse of power, or a range of other aggravating circumstances.
In its first year of operation, France handed out more than 700 fines under the new law, gender equality minister Marlene Schiappa posted on Twitter. While some feminists argue that even this law does not go far enough with 700 being a paltry number in the grand scheme of things, it does represent progress in tackling a widespread and deeply embedded problem.
