The Global Anti-Street Harassment Movement: A Digitally-Enabled Feminist Politics of Resistance

Across the world feminist activist groups – among them Hollaback!, Stop Street Harassment and HarassMap – have been developing an anti-street harassment social movement to resist and end sexual and gender-based harassment in public spaces. While over 100 anti-harassment initiatives have mobilised internationally in recent years, deploying a diverse and creative range of online and offline resistance strategies, to date there is no academic research on the movement’s formation or development. This is a serious omission given the movement’s global reach, and the growing recognition of street harassment as a pervasive and harmful social problem. Drawing on social movement theory and feminist literatures, this paper examines the ways in which new digital technologies – the internet, social media platforms, mobile phone technologies and crowdsourced maps – have enabled the emergence and development of the global(ising) movement. Based on semi-structured interviews with 32 anti-harassment activists operative in ten countries – Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Germany, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, the UK and the US – my research indicates that activists have effectively leveraged the affordances of digital technologies to create, organise and participate in collective action. I begin by examining the ways in which participation is enabled and enhanced by digital technologies; I argue that anti-harassment activism is made easier, faster and more widespread by technological affordances, and that the internet provides new opportunities for women to resist street harassment and to circumvent mainstream media narratives of sexual violence that normalise and enable harassment. I then go on to examine how digital technologies have facilitated the rapid diffusion of anti-harassment ideas and tactics among activists; I argue that through the internet, activists have learned from each other, borrowed, adapted and coordinated across dispersed sites, increasing the scale of anti-street harassment activism worldwide.