“That you’re a street harassment victim is such a posh girl thing to say.” Race, Class, and Girls’ Responses to Harassment Awareness Training

This article is based on ethnographic observations of a street harassment awareness raising program organized in French high schools and interviews with their participants. It draws from scholarship that examines the reception of policy and training programs through qualitative methods by analyzing their consequences from the perspective of the targeted beneficiaries. This approach seeks to provide an in-depth understanding of how potential beneficiaries—in this case, feminine high school students attending a street harassment awareness training program—make sense of and receive a policy or program in practice. Drawing from this approach to policy evaluation, it seeks to explain why responses to this program were much more antagonistic among feminine students of color in schools in disadvantaged areas than among mostly white girls in schools in more affluent areas. The findings show how girls’ intersectional identities (in terms of race and class) informed what meanings they attached to the identity of street harassment victim, in a context of popular stereotypes tying the problem to migration and racialized minority men. These differences in the normative connotations around the identity of victim, in turn, shaped how they responded to awareness-raising on the subject. Based on these findings, the article questions whether awareness-raising that exclusively focuses on street harassment—a problem that is popularly associated with racialized minority men—rather than harassment and gender-based violence more broadly, is an effective prevention strategy targeting people with different intersectional identities.