Public Harassment

Situations in Which Public Harassment Takes Place

Public harassment typically takes the form of face-to-face interaction between strangers, although it can occur between acquaintances as well. Examples of public harassment include touching by strangers; groping, ogling and gawking; outright hostile epithets; compliments that may be taken as patronizing or intrusive; brief followings and more concerted stalkings; and other activities or verbal communications that do not normally occur between strangers in public. Public harassment can cause an individual to feel alienated in public places, and thus it may negatively impact her or his sense of community.

Types of Public Harassment

There are three common types of public harassment. All three rely on a person being perceived as a member of a certain social category, rather than as a unique individual. The first type is exclusionary practice, by which a set of individuals is explicitly forbidden or simply discouraged from entering into some or all public places. Examples of this practice include historical laws that restricted people with disabilities from appearing in public, because they were felt to be an upsetting presence, especially for pregnant women and for children; and segregationist laws that mandated separate facilities for African Americans and for women or else disallowed their presence in certain sections of public places. The second type of public harassment is exploitation of presence. This type of harassment involves unpleasant variations in small freedoms taken or frank intrusions that effectively prevent a category of citizens from experiencing the relative “privacy while in public” that we expect as part of civil behavior. Examples include touching, close scrutiny and examination, or following someone. A third type of public harassment abuse is evaluative practice, which occurs when a public harasser nonverbally or verbally communicates a judgment or rating to a member of a target category. The public evaluation of a woman's appearance is an example of evaluative practice that occurs commonly in U.S. public spaces. At one extreme of innocuousness, the evaluator can claim to be expressing simple admiration or pleasure, as when one passing woman tells another that she likes the other's coat. Such “pure” evaluation is most commonly experienced when the evaluator is a member of the same social category as the recipient. However, even if the intentions of the evaluator are friendly, the target can claim a right to go about her or his business undisturbed by comments from strangers.

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