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Bystander intervention is a powerful response to sexual harassment that reduces victims’ burden to respond. However, gender prototypes depicting sexual harassment victims as prototypical women (i.e., stereotypically feminine) may hinder intervention when harassment targets women who deviate from this prototype. Across four preregistered experiments (N= 1,270 Americans), we test whether bystanders intervene less readily in nonprototypical (vs. prototypical) women’s sexual harassment. Participants observed a man manager ask a series of increasingly sexually harassing job interview questions toward either a gender prototypical or nonprototypical woman by traits (Studies 1–3) or gender identity (Study 4). Participants were instructed to intervene to stop the interview if/when they judged the questions as inappropriate. A meta-analysis revealed participants had a greater threshold for intervention when harassment targeted a nonprototypical (vs. prototypical) woman—a small but meaningful effect. Efforts to foster bystander intervention in sexual harassment would benefit by recognizing this neglect of nonprototypical women.
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Disciplining bystanders: (anti)carcerality, ethics, and the docile subject in HarassMap’s “the harasser is a criminal” media campaign in Egypt
Theorizing situates bystander intervention approaches to combat- ting street sexual harassment as either an anti-carceral mode of social justice concerned with citizen responsibility and reshaping community norms or a carceral practice that shifts forms and sites of penal power. This article examines the intersection and effect of carceral and anti-carceral framing techniques in the 2015 “The Harasser is a Criminal” media campaign deployed by the Egyptian anti-sexual harassment initiative HarassMap to promote bystander intervention. Situated within a sphere of Egyptian gender activism that is transnational, secular, and feminist-oriented, and operating within a militarized, authoritarian political context, HarassMap’s campaign complicates how bystander intervention is instrumentalized as a technology of power to shape subjective and intersubjective responses to Egypt’s street sexual harassment problem. Carceral and anti-carceral currents ow together in their campaign not to promote a reliance on police or juridical structures for redress, but to cultivate new ethical dispositions as a means of mobilizing individuals to act. Through the figure of the bystander, HarassMap is engaged in a biopolitical project which seeks to create new neoliberal subjects who police themselves and assume responsibility for their own behavior in public space.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1714864
- PAR ID:
- 10166504
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Feminist Media Studies
- ISSN:
- 1468-0777
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 16
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Olorunlana, Adetayo (Ed.)Black women’s sexual harassment is often overlooked and dismissed relative to White women’s harassment. In three pre-registered experiments, we test whether this neglect extends to bystander intervention in sexual harassment. Participants observed an ostensibly live job interview between a man manager and a Black or White woman job candidate. The manager’s questions were pre-programmed to grow increasingly harassing, and participants were asked to intervene if/when they found the interview inappropriate. A meta-analysis of the three studies (N= 1487), revealed that bystanders did not differ in their threshold for intervention when sexual harassment targeted the Black vs. White woman. Despite evidence for the relative neglect of Black women in responses to sexual harassment, these data suggest that bystanders may respond similarly for Black and White women.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Abstract Sexual harassment in field settings brings unique challenges for prevention and response, as field research occurs outside “typical” workplaces, often in remote locations that create additional safety concerns and new team dynamics. We report on a project that has 1) trained field project participants to recognize, report, and confront sexual harassment, and 2) investigated the perceptions, attitudes, and experiences of field researchers regarding sexual harassment. Pre-campaign surveys from four major, multi-institutional, domestic and international field projects indicate that the majority of sexual harassment reported prior to the field campaigns was hostile work environment harassment, and women were more likely to be the recipients, on average reporting 2-3 incidents each. The majority of those disclosing harassment indicated that they coped with past experiences by avoiding their harasser or downplaying incidents. Of the incidences reported (47) in post-campaign surveys of the four field teams, all fell under the category of hostile work environment and included incidents of verbal, visual, and physical harassment. Women’s harassment experiences were perpetrated by men 100% of the time, and the majority of the perpetrators were in more senior positions than the victims. Men’s harassment experiences were perpetrated by a mix of women and men, and the majority came from those at the same position of seniority. Post-project surveys indicate that the training programs (taking place before the field projects) helped participants come away with more positive than negative emotions and perceptions of the training, the leadership, and their overall experiences on the field campaign.more » « less
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We provide a model describing how the narrow prototype of women as having conventionally feminine attributes and identities serves as a barrier to perceiving sexual harassment and appropriately responding to sexual-harassment claims when the victims of harassment do not resemble this prototype. We review research documenting that this narrow prototype of women overlaps with mental representations of sexual-harassment targets. The prototype of women harms women who diverge from this prototype: Their experiences with sexual harassment are less likely to be perceived as such, and they experience more negative interpersonal, organizational, and legal consequences when they experience harassment. Perceptions of sexual harassment are the catalyst by which sexual harassment is recognized and remedied. Thus, narrow gender prototypes may impede the promise and potential of civil rights laws and antiharassment policy.more » « less
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Online sexual risks pose a serious and frequent threat to adolescents’ online safety. While significant work is done within the HCI community to understand teens’ sexual experiences through public posts, we extend their research by qualitatively analyzing 156 private Instagram conversations flagged by 58 adolescents to understand the characteristics of sexual risks faced with strangers, acquaintances, and friends. We found that youth are often victimized by strangers through sexual solicitation/harassment as well as sexual spamming via text and visual media, which is often ignored by them. In contrast, adolescents’ played mixed roles with acquaintances, as they were often victims of sexual harassment, but sometimes engaged in sexting, or interacted by rejecting sexual requests from acquaintances. Lastly, adolescents were never recipients of sexual risks with their friends, as they mostly mutually participated in sexting or sexual spamming. Based on these results, we provide our insights and recommendations for future researchers. Trigger Warning: This paper contains explicit language and anonymized private sexual messages. Reader discretion advised.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1785911
