‘After’: The Impact of Sexual Harassment – Remembering and Resisting Across Time and Space
Mind the Gender Gap: A Mobilities Perspective of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground
ISBN: 978-1-83753-029-8, eISBN: 978-1-83753-026-7
Publication date: 25 October 2024
Abstract
This chapter focusses on what happens ‘after’ an incident of sexual harassment. It explores the impact that the memory of sexual harassment has on women and their mobilities in the city over time. By employing ‘memory’ as a sociological concept in order to link space, time and women’s embodied experiences, this chapter aims to understand the negotiations that women undertake in order to ‘deal with’ the incidents of sexual harassment and claim back their mobility and freedom. It will pay attention to how the impact is not static, but rather shifts and morphs over time and space. Importantly, this analysis moves beyond simply discussing women’s fear and vulnerability and makes room for a consideration of how sexual harassment on public transport is negotiated and resisted, and how the experiences or memories are also suppressed and can, at times, act to embolden women in their urban mobilities. Using the conceptual framework structured around mobilities, space and time this chapter offers a unique analysis of the impact of sexual harassment in a transport environment.
Keywords
Citation
Lewis, S. (2024), "‘After’: The Impact of Sexual Harassment – Remembering and Resisting Across Time and Space", Mind the Gender Gap: A Mobilities Perspective of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground (Feminist Developments in Violence and Abuse), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-026-720241006
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024 Siân Lewis
License
This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
It’s like a process you go through … I started off feeling violated, and then I felt shocked at the same time and upset and I went on to feeling angry, like how dare someone do that to me, I was just minding my own business on a tube train. Then you feel determined that you want to do something, then when you’ve finally done that, gone to the police or done something else that makes you feel better, then you start to accept what happened. (Sheila)
You’re damned whatever you do … the ‘right’ way to act, it’s never fixed either and you’re constantly negotiating for your space and renegotiating for your righteousness. (Kath)
As an adult looking back on it, I’m like mate, you did not need to feel guilty or ashamed, tell your Mum. But I know I would never have in that situation. If that happened to me now, I’d be much more like, what’s your problem get away from me … it wouldn’t frighten me as much, that kind of thing, but yeah we get used to it …. (Ellie)
Ever since, if a man’s … like I remember there was this guy, and he was very tall and his hand brushed my bum and I said listen I’m really sorry but this has happened to me … and for the rest of the journey he had his hands up like it’s fine …. (Becky)
I still feel pretty safe on the tube. But I walk through that tunnel pretty much every time I commute, and pretty much every time I sort of see him in my head, you know. (Rachel)
In this chapter, we explore the impact that sexual harassment in a transport environment has on women’s negotiations of urban space and on their mobilities in the city over time. We will consider the immediate impact of these intrusions, and how women ‘deal with’ these encounters in the moments that directly follow. We will also pay attention to how the spectre of these experiences exists in women’s periphery, shifting in form and focus over time and space, contorting women’s mobilities in the city. There is existing work that offers important insights into both the short- and long-term impact of sexual harassment, and this will briefly be reviewed. Then, to contribute a new angle to these discussions, I introduce memory as a useful sociological concept, reasoning that it allows us to link space, time, and women’s embodied experience. In doing so, this reveals that the impact of sexual harassment is not static or contained, but a mobile, malleable process that is regularly reconstructed depending on the contours of time and space.
We explore this phenomenon through the stories of Kath, Ellie, Beth and Rachel, tracing the negotiations that these four women undertake in order to manage the immediate experience and memory of sexual harassment and claim back their mobility. Kath talks about how she was assaulted twice by the same person only weeks apart, and how the first incident emboldened her reaction to the second. Ellie reflects on a childhood incident, considering how her understanding of what happened has changed over the years, and how the memory of the incident has impacted on her mobilities over time. Beth, who was groped by a businessman on a rush hour Tube talks about the process of reporting to the police, and how moving through the criminal justice system stipulated the process of remembering. Rachel was assaulted in an Underground tunnel and talks about how past experiences of sexual violence impacted on her reaction here. Understanding these stories through the approach outlined above, we move beyond sanitising and reducing women’s complex responses to narrate a fixed state of fear and vulnerability. It allows us to see how sexual harassment in public space is negotiated and resisted, and how, alongside fear, these experiences and their memories are purposefully suppressed or brought into focus in order to reclaim space and mobility.
The Impact of Sexual Harassment in Public Space
When considering the immediate impact of sexual violence, research often focusses on how it leads to increased levels of fear (Keane, 1995; Pain, 1991; Stanko, 1993). This immediate fear is experienced in an intensely sensorial and corporeal way. Brooks Gardner (1995, p. 211) describes how reactions to public harassment are often physical, giving examples of flinching, muscle tension, and internal – stopping breathing, feeling numb, feeling like jelly. Lefebvre (2004, p. 31) writes how the body can experience a disruption of rhythms or arrhythmia and describes this as: ‘in suffering, in confusion, a particular rhythm surges up and imposes itself: palpitation, breathlessness, pains in the place of satiety’. These descriptions can be understood as interoceptive sensory responses to fear (Holt & Lewis, 2024), and they are necessary and useful to recognise the immediate, fear-based physical reaction to sexual harassment, as it often plays a key role in dictating the visible external response to harassment, such as freezing (though, as we explored in the previous chapter these responses are also implicated by the social space in which they occur).
Yet it is important to acknowledge that this is not the only or normal response to such an intrusion, rather, just one on a wide spectrum of multifarious possible reactions. As Lefebvre (2004) considers, we become more acutely aware of our rhythms when they suffer some irregularity – when in a state of arrythmia, they are given more attention. As such, those women who do not have fear responses, whose internal rhythms are less disturbed or disrupted, may find it difficult to articulate or make this (lack of) sensation tangible and known. These experiences can then be side-lined and neglected from analysis, mitigating the social and academic understanding of these reactions. As Koskela (2010, p. 305) considers ‘It is so frequently said that women are afraid that it seems almost indecent to say that they are not’. She considers how women’s fear is often regarded as normal, whilst boldness and defiance are considered to be risky and subversive. Indeed, much existing literature omits how women’s immediate responses to sexual harassment are often positioned between the binaries of confrontation and passivity. Similarly, when considering the immediate external response to sexual harassment, it is important to conceptualise ‘doing nothing’ or ‘not reacting’ as active choices, rather than framing them as passivity. Brooks Gardner (1995) describes how women she spoke to in her research on street harassment felt they were managing power by pretending nothing was happening. Vera-Gray and Kelly (2020) consider how ‘not reacting’ can be a form of embodied safety work, and Madriz (1997) states how women ignore or deny their fear to minimise the harmful impact it could have. Furthermore, Sandberg and Ronnblom (2013) recognise how women in their research expressed ambivalence towards their own fear and argued that this attitude can be framed as an expression of resistance.
Similar themes exist in the literature that focusses on the long term impact of sexual harassment. Much of this work has emphasised how these intrusions cause an increased sense of vulnerability, leading to heightened levels of fear of similar experiences happening again (Mellgren et al., 2018). Painter (1992) and Valentine (1990) argue that experiences of sexual harassment can bolster fear of public spaces and cause women to perceive (male) strangers as unpredictable, leading to women adopting strategies to avoid further victimisation in public space (Keane, 1998). These strategies or behavioural modifications are what Vera-Gray and Kelly (2020) term ‘safety work’ and are consequential as they can act to decrease women’s freedoms and quality of public life (Pain, 1991; Vera-Gray, 2018). This has also been explicitly connected to mobilities. Keane (1998) frames this fear and its adaptations as a ‘mobility restrictor’, and Ceccato (2017) and Loukaitou-Sideris (2014) articulate the impact of fear of sexual harassment on transport as impairing mobility. However, it is also important to recognise that additional fear is not the only active ingredient in long-term negotiations of experiences of sexual harassment. Pain (1997, p. 238) highlights how, because women are acutely aware of the constraints imposed upon them by (fear of) violence, they are also angry about it, and are ‘ingenious in their efforts to limit the effect of these constraints’. Koskela (2010, p. 309) recognises how women who are harassed in a space they use regularly often do not then perceive the space as dangerous due to its familiarity, and how ‘making use of space a part of one’s daily routine erases the myth of danger from it’. This signifies that even those who experience fear often take active measures to (re)negotiate their right to the city. This work is useful in understanding normative perceptions of the impact of sexual harassment in the short and long term. However, I contend that by using the concept of memory in tandem with rhythmanalysis, we can understand how memories of sexual harassment ebb and flow in form and prominence, offering us a nuanced analysis of how women negotiate and manage the impact of sexual harassment in transit over time and space, thus framing ‘impact’ as something capricious and unfixed.
The Rhythms of Remembering
The concept of memory relates to the way in which we reconceptualise the past in relation to the present and future. A sociology of memory (in comparison to psychoanalytic and cognitive psychological approaches) examines the way in which individual and collective memories are formed and transformed over time within social and cultural frameworks (Halbwachs, 1950; Oakley, 2016). In one of the earliest studies of memory by a sociologist, Jane Addams (1916, 2002) frames personal recollection as an ongoing individual, subjective, emotional, cognitive and social process. Keightley (2010, p. 56) frames remembering as ‘… a process of making sense of experience, of constructing and navigating complex temporal narratives and structures and ascribing meaning not only to the past, but to the present and future also’. It is memory that makes the past a lived process that is reconceptualised and negotiated in everyday experience. In this chapter, the temporal nature of memory helps to discern how incidents of sexual harassment are (re)remembered and (re)negotiated over time and how their impact on women’s experiences of mobility in urban space is ever-changing. So, we see how a focus on memory encourages us to observe the entangling of past and present in order to make sense of both. In simple terms, we use the past to make sense of the present, and simultaneously, we use the present to make sense of the past.
Emotional and Mobile Memories
The ‘remembering’ of incidents of sexual violence has been theorised, and understood in practice, as a form of ‘traumatic memory’. Trauma is said to escape full consciousness (Caruth, 1995) and therefore, these kinds of memories are often fragmented and incoherent (Sotgiu & Galati, 2007). Indeed, Hardy et al. (2009) have considered how memories of rape and sexual assault are contingent on this impaired processing of memory. It has been widely recognised that trauma has continuing repercussions, impacting on a person’s ability to perceive and navigate life after the event(s). It is possible that some women in this research may consider their experiences as traumatic (though this language was not explicitly used). However, a more appropriate term for how many of the women conceptualised and reflected on their experiences, is an ‘emotional memory’. Tromp et al. (1995) describe how emotional memories with intense affect are remembered more accurately and are more accessible than neutral events. The stories recalled below, are perhaps better framed, as Pickering and Keightley (2009) theorise, as painful or emotional memories, rather than trauma, as they have been integrated into women’s lives and they were able to recall them in detail (such detail which, in fact, took many participants by surprise). Therefore, it is arguably more appropriate, in this instance, to frame incidents of sexual harassment as ‘emotionally intense events’.
Another significant aspect of traumatic or emotional memories that is particularly related to sexual violence, is how these experiences are redefined and acknowledged over time. Even when, by legal definition, incidents meet the criteria for rape or sexual assault, women often do not label their experiences as such (Bondurant, 2001; Fisher et al., 2003). This has been written about extensively with regard to unacknowledged rape, particularly when perpetrated by an intimate partner (Jaffe et al., 2017; Kahn et al., 2003). Some literature frames this ‘denial’ as avoidance, or as a coping mechanism to deal with a traumatic encounter (Roth & Newman, 1991), and others consider how the normalisation of harmful and criminal behaviours impacts the way victims understand what has happened (Hlavka, 2014; Sinko et al., 2021). Due to the initial disengagement with experiences, the labelling of incidents is often delayed (Cleere & Lynn, 2013). Redefinition over time can be caused by numerous factors including a shift in societal attitudes and the individual’s life trajectory. Botta and Pingree (1997) also highlight how the sharing of common stories is an important way in which women recognise and redefine their experiences as assault or rape (this resonates with the outpouring of stories as a consequence of the #MeToo movement). As explored below, memories of sexual harassment are reconceptualised and redefined over time, as women traverse personal and social landscapes that shift their understanding of their own experience. In turn, this continual reconceptualisation impacts how the experience, in tandem with other encounters, continues to play a fluctuating role in their negotiations of urban space.
Benjamin (1968) writes how memory and the metropolis are interwoven as memory shapes, and is in turn, shaped by the urban setting. We can link this to women’s experiences and memories of sexual harassment and how they interplay with the city spaces. Warr (1984) speaks of women’s propensity to transfer past experiences and memories of victimisation to present situations. This links to women being increasingly fearful in public space after experiencing sexual intrusion (Koskela, 2010; Loukaitou-Sideris & Fink, 2009). ‘Mental mapping’ is a term lodged within urban studies, geography and social psychology (Lynch, 1975; Tuan, 1975) that regards remembering, knowing and negotiating restrictions in the urban environment (Middleton, 2009). A person’s mental map emerges out of their physical, emotional and sensorial engagement with the space (Ingold, 2007), and these maps are understood as mobile and unstable. For women who have experienced sexual harassment in public space, these encounters are subsumed into their (subjective) understandings of what is safe and what is risky. As we see in the stories below, the intrusions distort notions of predictability in familiar spaces, and render the sense of ownership and freedom in the city as precarious and something that must be renegotiated. By conceptualising memories as not only temporal but also spatial, we can see how they must be understood as mobile to allow us to grasp the viscosity of their impact on women as they move through urban space.
Negotiating the Memory and Impact of Sexual Harassment
We will now follow Kath, Ellie, Beth and Rachel’s stories to illustrate how, following an experience of sexual harassment on the London Underground, women negotiated the impact of the incident over time and space. Conceptualising these memories as spatio-temporally implicated shows that their meanings are not fixed and can be redefined over time. It allows recognition of how sexual harassment has disrupted women’s freedom, and also how they have actively resisted and minimised disruption. It highlights that amidst confusion and fear, women also have active agency in their negotiation of public space after experiencing sexual harassment.
Kath
As a 40-year-old, born and bred Londoner, Kath has travelled on the Underground for as long as she can remember and describes having a ‘misguided sense of invincibility’ when confidently navigating the network. Yet she reflects on how two experiences of sexual harassment that were committed by the same man, a few weeks apart, disrupted her notion of freedom in the city that she knows and loves. Travelling in the early evening, Kath recalls her internal thought process and physical reaction to a man putting his hands between her legs, and then over her body:
I’m like, I’m reasonably sure I’m being assaulted …. Then a couple of stops on I’m like yeah I’m definitely being assaulted and now I haven’t done anything about it, I’ve not moved, I’m frozen and he’s had his knuckles between my legs for a few tube stops ….
Her experience is initially dominated by uncertainty. As Gardner (1995, p. 154) states ‘caught between a number of possible lines of action, a woman can be frozen into inaction’. Whilst freezing appears to be an intense corporeal, physical reaction, it is also what Koskela (2010, p. 306) describes as ‘reasoning’. Not moving is an embodied reaction implicated by social, spatial, temporal complexity, and its occurrence reveals an active tension, or friction between rhythms. Lefebvre (2004, p. 47) also recognises that although freezing may seem instinctive and natural ‘the representation of the natural falsifies situations. Something passes as natural precisely when it conforms perfectly and without apparent effort to accepted models, to the habits valorised by a tradition …’. Freezing and ‘inaction’ are commonly attributed as embodied responses to fear, yet Kath’s elaboration shows that surprise and uncertainty are, in her case, more significant:
You sort of second-guess yourself don’t you, which I think is a significant thing about the tube … because you’ve got that window. Is that? Maybe they’re not doing it deliberately, I don’t want to make a fuss … you don’t want to be oversensitive and accuse someone when they’re going about their business …. I have to make a conscious, active choice. The opposite of submissive, I have to make an active decision, and to do that I have to be sure of what’s happened and I have to make that choice quickly, in that window, before it becomes really awkward. Second-guessing, maybe he doesn’t like the draft near the door … all this shit going on in my head …. It’s that fatal period of: is it? By the time you’ve worked it out, you’ve missed your window to make fuss.
Lefebvre (2004, p. 52) says about how irregular rhythms produce antagonistic effects ‘it throws out of order and disrupts; it is symptomatic of a disruption …’. Due to the surprise and uncertainty that Kath experienced, this ‘freezing’ prevents her from acting overtly. She also highlights how the transitory nature impacted on her reaction: ‘it’s nonsense but I have explicitly thought this in my head … oh well, it’s only three stops to Baker Street, how much worse can it get?’. This highlights the significance of the spatial and temporal complexity of negotiating such an experience on the Tube. Kath also discusses how this particular reaction unsettled her due to it being incongruent with her sense of self:
It bothers me, I consider myself to be a strong feminist, I’m known for having a big mouth and an attitude. I’m known for being a bolshie bird, and I consider myself to be one, because I wouldn’t take that kind of crap elsewhere, yet … again it happens.
This mirrors Gardner’s (1995, p. 12) work in which she states ‘women with highly developed politicised feminist consciousness were not always satisfied with their methods of handling harassment’. Memories form our identity (McQuire, 1998) as we construct coherent selves that have consistency over time. This formation of self takes place in everyday, individual experiences. As Wilson et al. (2009) consider, it involves the memory of the past self, an awareness of the present self and the anticipation of the future self, and Adam (1991, p. 71) posits that living beings are, from the depth of their temporal being, practising centres of action rather than perpetrators of fixed behaviour. This is supported by Kath’s account of her subsequent experience. She describes how a few weeks later, the same man gets on at the same stop (Kilburn), which Kath describes as ‘her station’, and positions himself directly behind her on the Tube, and puts his hands on her again. She remembers thinking: ‘I thought if I let this go, I’m going to live in fear of him’. This highlights that her ‘(re)action’ is not immediate or instinctive but a deliberate response impacted by her previous experience:
I turned around and I went get the fuck away from me. I said you’ve done this to me before, your hands are all over me and I’m not having you do this to me on my journey to work, I’m not living in fear of you, I’m not having it and he was like you crazy woman what are you talking about? And I said if that’s the case you’ll have no problem moving away from me then do you, so move.
Adam (1991, p. 147) purports that ‘we are shown to relive the past and to learn from it; to use it for future action’. For Kath, the memory of the first incident impacts directly on her reaction to the second. She also discusses the tension she felt in negotiating her reactions saying: ‘I end up feeling guilty because I’ve caused a fuss’. This draws attention to the importance of not having an established hierarchy of responses, and of not considering ‘speaking out’ or being active’ as the most preferable way to react. Kath acknowledges this saying: ‘You’re damned whatever you do … the ‘right’ way to act, it’s never fixed either and you’re constantly negotiating for your space and renegotiating for your righteousness’. She says ‘It makes it sound like you’ve failed if you don’t shout about it’, but she also considers the difficulties that come with reacting overtly:
Every time you laugh it off, every time your mates find it funny, it looks like you’re not an ideal victim because you didn’t say no. But you’re also in a catch 22 because by taking control of that you’re acting in a way that people aren’t supposed to behave, you’re being loud and out of place …. And it’s that constant battle to stake your claim, mark out your own territory …. And it is so much about space and how you’re able to stake out your territory, how much you compromise, you have in your head the idea that you’ve failed to conform to what a righteous victim does’.
Kath says she found it: ‘challenging to my idea that I was free, to go about my business as I please … they’ve taken your space away and that’s definitely a lot of it and why you might feel so violated or uncomfortable’. As well as causing her to question her sense of self, it also affected her sense of urban competency and ownership of the city. However, the comparison between her two experiences shows how her initial reaction to the first incident was freezing out of surprise and uncertainty; she processed this reaction, and in the subsequent incident she is therefore more prepared and confronts her harasser, despite this causing her anxiety and internal friction.
Ellie
Ellie is 30 now and living in Brighton. She recalls her 12th birthday when she was visiting London with her Mum. Excited to be in the city and feeling grown up in her new, tight, sparkly dress, she wanted to feel independent, so she sat away from her Mum on the Tube. Over the course of the journey, she remembers being stared at intently by a man sitting opposite her, who, as she got up to leave, put his hand up her dress and tried to follow her. She discusses her immediate reaction to what happened:
There was a whole load of stuff going on about how I felt about that at the time … I felt ashamed, I didn’t want to make a scene and I certainly didn’t want to ask for my Mum either … I was 12, I was grown up … but yeah certainly an element of, I don’t want anyone to see this is happening, so I’m just going to act normal ….’
The space is significant here, as is Lefebvre’s (2004) notion of ‘dressage’ and the concealment of inner rhythms. Ellie, whilst experiencing a state of disruption and arrhythmia, forces herself to act in line with the social etiquette of the space. For her, her immediate reaction at the time was fear and self-blame, as she focussed instantly on her own appearance: ‘I was so … scared but also immediately ashamed of what I was wearing and conscious, and wishing I’d dressed down and wished I’d never bought that stupid dress and it was horrible’. Historically women and girls have been advised to manipulate their dress and behaviour for the sake of remaining safe and preventing crime (Gardner, 1990). Pain (1997) also considers how constantly reinforced notions about how women should be and present themselves in public space can lead to embodied knowledge that includes the inclination to internalise and engage in self-blame. Being 12 years old, for Ellie, this moment took on particular significance: ‘It’s the first time I can remember in my life, being looked at like that. And I knew that he wasn’t just being starey, he was looking at me in a predatory, frightening way’. As a ‘first’, the moment becomes a meaningful and emotional memory that impacted her subsequently:
I just felt it was the first time I was more aware of myself … because I absolutely placed all the blame on me. I didn’t blame him … it was my fault because I was wearing that dress and so no, it didn’t make me frightened of men, I just learnt to never dress like that again …. It impacted me for ages afterwards … just feeling very ashamed, is the only way I can describe it. I just felt really ashamed, I never … well I mean I wear tight clothes now, but for a long time afterwards I would never have worn anything like that again, like got my legs out ….
The immediate feeling of shame became a prolonged and embodied memory that permeated into the broader context of her life. As well as implicating her presentation of self (Goffman, 1955), it also had an effect on her sense of self: ‘I still feel that really strongly when I look back, that’s the first time anyone looked at me like that … I never thought about myself in that way, never ever, it was the first time ever’. This links to work that has considered how our own bodies are brought into consciousness when we experience pain or discomfort (Cregan, 2006; Leder, 1990) or, a state of arrhythmia. For Ellie, the awareness that she is being sexualised disrupts her sense of self, making her acutely aware of her body and what she is wearing. Drawing attention to temporality, she also discusses the time it took to speak about the incident:
I was so ashamed. I didn’t talk to anyone about it at all, until a few years ago when I told my Mum … yeah, years later, about 5 years ago I brought it up to my Mum, I was like, it was so horrible Mum … I have lived with this, it was really scary.
This relates to what Pickering and Keightley (2009, p. 238) consider with regard to traumatic memories, where traumatic experience and the consequent repressed memory mean it is difficult to ‘make storyable’. This shows the significance of temporality as to how such an experience is negotiated. The passing of time (13 years in this case) allowed feelings of shame to dissipate enough to share the experience. Furthermore, the phrase ‘I have lived with this’ shows how this memory has become imbedded into her ‘autobiographical memory’ (Misztal, 2003, p. 78) as something that she has been required to negotiate across time and space. Ellie reflects on how her judgement of the incident has altered over time:
As an adult looking back on it, I’m like mate, you did not need to feel guilty or ashamed, tell your Mum. But I know I would never have in that situation. If that happened to me now, I’d be much more like, what’s your problem get away from me … it wouldn’t frighten me as much, that kind of thing, but yeah we get used to it ….
She recognises that now she would act differently, yet also, as Adam (1991, p. 143) states, how ‘… the contemporary reliving is always inclusive of the intervening years, that these years are fundamentally implicated and resonate through the experience. The relived experience is different because of it’. This also links with literature that discusses how traumatic or emotional memories of sexual assault are redefined over time, allowing victims to redirect blame towards the perpetrator (Bondurant, 2001; Cleere & Lynn, 2013).
The spatial-temporal dimension is also significant in Ellie’s account. She describes how it impacted her perception of the space of the Underground, saying: ‘It totally made me petrified of the tube. And I suppose the thing about that as well was that I wasn’t regularly using the tube’. Volkan (2002, p. 45) considers how people establish connections between past trauma and present or future threats. As a non-frequent traveller on the Tube, there is no familiarity or logic to it being relatively safe, therefore this incident became a formative memory, intrinsically associated with the space and increased her level of fear of the Underground. Ellie recognises this saying how as time has gone on she is less fearful of the space, in part due to this familiarity: ‘my memories of it as a child are definitely … always something horrible … as an adult I don’t notice that nearly as much, and I guess I’ve kind of got used to it’. This signifies the intersection of space, time and memory with regard to the lasting impact of sexual harassment. She also indicates how the incident has permeated her views of the Tube as an adult:
I’m sure that incident has to do with how I feel about the tube now, in that it’s not … I wouldn’t choose to go on the tube everyday if I can avoid it. I’m fairly, well very cautious about travelling alone because I’ve had a number of things happen to me … sometimes I might have to get a tube back on my own … but in that situation I don’t feel safe.
Fear of a particular place can lead to avoidance or constrained behaviour (Ferraro, 1996), which can become a ‘routine activity’ (Keane, 1998, p. 63). Also noting ‘avoidance’ as significant in women’s patterns of mobility, Gardner (1995, p. 202) describes how women have their own ‘personal geography of public space’, or, as mentioned earlier, possess a subjective ‘mental map’ of where is safe and where is dangerous. Reflecting on the incident 13 years later, it is clear that the memory of that childhood experience has impacted on Ellie’s feeling of freedom and safety when she uses the Underground.
Becky
Becky is 31 years old, living in London and working in Canary Wharf. She describes an incident that happened around three years ago. On her way to work on a busy Tube, a man grabs her backside with both hands. She describes her immediate reaction saying: ‘I turned around and I went, what are you doing? I nearly took a photo of him, but I wasn’t feeling that brave …. And as soon as I challenged him, he said oh, I’m so sorry’. Here, the image of the passive commuter body situated within an anonymous and transitory space is exploited by the perpetrator. There is an assumption that women will not speak out, and that if they do the anonymity of the environment will act as a cover (as discussed in Chapter 5). Yet despite this, Becky reacted in an overt way, confronting her harasser. Yet she also hints at how her desired reaction was restricted by fear. This links to Koskela’s (2010) claim that feelings of fear and boldness are rarely either/or. It is important to recognise that women talking about their boldness, does not deny their fear. Following this initial reaction, Becky arrives at her stop and immediately goes to report the incident:
I got off the tube and I went to the guys on the platform and said that guy’s just assaulted me. And he left the building. They were the loveliest people. They took me up to the control room and put me on the phone to BTP … and at that point I was actually fine, I just wanted to report it because it’s important to report these things.
The fact that it was her regular journey (Northern Line to Bank and then DLR to Canary Wharf-South Quay) and she knew (by sight) the staff at the station, allowed her a sense of familiarity and reassurance: ‘you feel … it’s kind of like a community because you go through the same stations every day. And the station staff rarely change and you kind of get used to it’. The cumulative knowledge of the space as safe and repetitive (Edensor, 2010; Lefebvre, 2004) gave her the confidence and encouragement to speak out immediately. After reporting, Becky went to work, and then to running practice. She describes how on the way home she felt a ‘delayed reaction’ of ‘feeling his hands pressed against my bum’.
And I remember I took a picture of myself on the tube, which I think I still have … on the way home from training. I was like this is what it looks like to feel like this …. And I never posted this picture anywhere, I just took the picture on my phone and was like this is what I look like when I’ve been violated.
McQuire (1998) discusses how photography is used as a form of remembering and preservation. Becky’s own negotiation of the experience was to make it more permanent and solidify the memory and how it felt. She monumentalises this moment and makes it significant in order to validate her own experience. Whilst her negotiation and ownership of the experience led her to feel empowered, she recognises how the process of reporting and going to court can be drawn out and time consuming, creating a friction between the desire to ‘move on’ and the desire for ‘justice’:
The thing about not going to court, I can totally understand because it’s an arduous process, spending 18 months waiting and then having to tell a police officer every time you book a holiday, and waiting and being told you need to keep this week free … I think I had moments where I was like I don’t like this. And moments in the process of going to court … emotionally it kind of did get to me but I wasn’t really aware of that when it was happening.
The process of going to court meant that the incident was still an everyday part of her life to be negotiated. As McQuire (1998, p. 164) states: ‘Distance from the past is less than a simple measure of chronology’. In the long run, Becky considers how this incident has emboldened her claim to space. Crime prevention research has described how women who have been victims of crime subsequently adopt behaviours to avoid being victimised again (Ball & Wesson, 2017; Gekoski et al., 2015) and the impact that this has on mobility and therefore quality of life is also well documented (d’Arbois de Jubainville & Vanier, 2017; Loukaitou-Sideris et al., 2014). Yet as Koskela (2010, p. 205) states ‘Women are not merely objects in space where they experience restrictions and obligations; they also actively produce, define and reclaim space’. Becky described how the incident caused her to moderate her behaviour on the Tube:
Ever since, if a man’s … like I remember there was this guy, and he was very tall and his hand brushed my bum and I said listen I’m really sorry but this has happened to me, and I told him what happened to me and I just get a little bit freaked out, would you mind raising your hands. And he said that’s not a problem, and for the rest of the journey he had his hands up like it’s fine. I did get really uncomfortable when men stood too close to me and I’d be like can I have a bit of space please, that did bother me.
This connects with Koskela’s (2010) notion of ‘reasoning’, where anxiety is managed by strategies to maintain courage and increase confidence, and how women make the space feel like their own through ‘mode and style’, projecting the message that they are not afraid. Employing strategies to avoid harassment is part of women’s everyday rhythm and movement around the city. They are actioned to such an extent that strategising public space in this way is ‘taken-for-granted’ (Phadke et al., 2011; Vera-Gray & Kelly, 2020). As Kearl (2010, p. 18) states ‘it tends to become a part of their existence and something they must learn to cope with if they want to be able to participate in public life’. Brooks Gardner (1995) considers that even routine pleasures in public space will be experienced with the knowledge of what can occur.
Rachel
Rachel is 31 and has lived in London for the past 10 years. She was travelling back from a work trip in Birmingham to her home in Walthamstow, London. She was heading through an underground tunnel towards the Tube in Euston at around 11 pm. A man asked her for directions, and when she stopped and responded, he accosted her, pushing her against the wall and trying to kiss her. She describes her initial reaction to the incident:
I was like what the fuck … what’s happening and then he grabbed me really hard around my neck, and I was in the tunnel still at this point, it was quiet and then I started struggling, but I was laughing I think out of shock. And also, by that point I … I should say there’s context to this, I was quite badly sexually assaulted about 6 months before that … Yeah and I guess smiling is sort of my way of defence in situations like that, like if I come across as friendly and normal then it’ll all go away ….
The effects of her previous experience impact her reaction here. As Wilson (1991, p. 102) states: ‘we find that the past is not left as “past”, because individuals carry their pasts around with them’. Wanting the situation to deescalate is congruent to literature that considers sexual harassment as invoking fear of a more severe attack (Gardner et al., 2017; Loukaitou-Sideris & Fink, 2009; Pain, 1991). Therefore, smiling, cooperating and being ‘passive’ is in fact an active choice. When he wouldn’t stop, she describes how she elbowed him in the stomach and told him to leave. She then talks about how she tried to push it out of her mind and carry on with her journey:
And then I stopped thinking about it. You know that classic thing of pushing it away. It was that thing where you start minimising … I guess, you just think I can’t really cope with that being a horrible thing so I’m going to make it a not horrible thing. And you also have to carry on with your life, you don’t want to sit there thinking about it all the time … I guess my approach is just let it be over really.
This links to what Jedlowski (2001) describes as the spontaneous process of forgetting what is problematic and painful. It is also resonant of literature that highlights how, as a coping mechanism, women often do not define experiences of sexual assault as such (Roth & Newman, 1991). However, it also highlights an element of resisting the disruption of mobilities by normalising or suppressing the incident itself. Whilst this can be said to play into the normalisation of sexual harassment, it can also be conceptualised as an active decision to minimise disruption to mobilities. Mehta and Bondi (1999) found that women in their research spoke about not letting sexual violence impact or ruin their lives. It is a negotiation that allows the incident to be put into the past, rather than continuing to play an explicit role in the present.
Rachel also talks about how the notion of ‘speaking out’ or overtly reacting is problematic for her: ‘I’ve tried learning to shout and speak out but it’s just not me … And I don’t think the burden should be on the person that’s experiencing it to have to speak up in a certain way …’. This links with the pressure for women to report experiences of sexual harassment to authorities. There are a number of reasons recognised as limitations on women reporting incidents of sexual harassment in transit (Ceccato, 2017; Gekoski et al., 2015; Loukaitou-Sideris & Fink, 2009; Solymosi et al., 2017). What is often not considered is the implicit message that comes with encouraging women to report sexual harassment. Whilst there are clear benefits that come with reporting (particularly in the long term with regard to policing), it dictates that the burden lies with women to speak out in order for sexual harassment to be combatted. Rachel recognises this saying:
My friends … said why don’t you just speak up and I don’t actually find that a supportive response because it makes me feel like I’ve been really inadequate … and my husband, he was really adamant that I had to report it. And I was so like, why are you blaming me? And he turned it into being a bit about that … but I felt really guilty that I didn’t.
Literature that considers the impact of sexual violence in public often focusses on ‘space based avoidance’ (Ceccato, 2017; d’Arbois de Jubainville & Vanier, 2017, p. 194; Loukaitou-Sideris & Fink, 2009). Memory helps us navigate environments (Foster, 2009), and Rachel’s regular use and habitual memories of the space are part of her individual ‘map of everyday experience’ (Koskela, 2010, p. 309). She retains the knowledge that it is normally a safe space and is therefore able to maintain her regular use of the Tube. For Rachel, although she did not adopt any avoidance behaviours or curtail her physical urban mobilities, the experience was not without spatial implications. Context and space impact the recall of particular memories. Holloway and Hubbard (2001, p. 48) consider how people’s images and perceptions of a familiar place remain fairly stable, but acknowledge how a departure from the normal experience can prompt the need for an individual to reassess how they should act and behave within that particular space. Rachel describes how the memory of the incident repeatedly intrudes upon her as she passes through the tunnel where it happened and how this has led her to interact differently in the Tube network:
I still feel pretty safe on the tube. But I walk through that tunnel pretty much every time I commute, and pretty much every time I sort of see him in my head, you know. And it’s not uncomfortable but I would say that now, in Euston station I note when there aren’t people around and also, I just wouldn’t be friendly to anyone, I really wouldn’t. I’ve given up on that.
The way she describes ‘seeing him’ can be linked to literature on traumatic or emotional memory where mental images of the past spill over into the present (Volkan, 2002, p. 45). Hardy et al. (2009, p. 786) discuss this in regard to sexual assault, where women subsequently experience ‘intrusive imagery’ and Keightley (2010, p. 57) describes how memory can be an involuntary response to sensory perceptions in the present. Rachel states:
I still use the tube, but it has a little bit in the sense that I guess it just reminds me to always be careful. But it has also made me think I’m not going to take this shit anymore, now I’ve processed it I actually now would just go and tell someone.
This links to what Pain (1997, p. 234) described as an ‘assiduous state of vigilance’ with regard to women’s behavioural adaptations. Negotiating space in a mobile environment can become habitual, requiring little attention which can in turn become a source of pleasure (Edensor, 2010). Yet Rachel describes how due to this incident she has now become more wary in this particular space of the London Underground. Whilst habits allow a diminishment of self-monitoring (which women already experience more than men) (Young, 1980), this incident of harassment has taken away both feelings of safety, and automaticity that permit a sense of ‘zoning out’, relaxation and enjoyment (Urry, 2007), with her urban rhythms consequently becoming disrupted. Rachel says:
It’s so connected to you and your own personal self. And at the same time, I wouldn’t ever want to stop doing stuff … so in my head there’s now a very clear line as to any approach from a man in particular that makes me feel threatened, it doesn’t matter whether or not they thought it was threatening.
Relating to the memory of trauma, Pickering and Keightley (2009, p. 238) consider how the handling of traumatic events can lead to the development of stronger personalities. The subtlety of this links to Lefebvre’s (2004) concept of ‘secret’ or psychological rhythms. Recognising this shows how using fear as a collective way to describe women’s reactions can generalise and erase the negotiations such as vigilance and cautiousness or an emboldened use of space.
This chapter has focussed on how the memory of an experience of sexual harassment impacts women’s mobilities in the city across space and time. The concept of memory has allowed an exploration as to how a past experience of harassment impacts on present negotiations of urban space and transport, and how both the memory and its impact are renegotiated over time. As time passes women (re)define their experiences, sometimes recognising them only later as sexual harassment or sexual assault. Whilst this recognition caused a sense of being wronged or victimised, this should not be obscured by inducing fear and vulnerability. These accounts show that incidents of sexual harassment and their conceptualisations were often transformed by women into a positive action force in order to make sense of what happened to them and to embolden their claim to public space.
The conceptual framework of rhythms, friction and memory has allowed for a consideration of both the bodily reaction and the social, spatial and temporal dynamics at work when women experience sexual harassment, and how these are negotiated over time. The fact that these incidents are happening in a transport environment – a moving space – brings to the forefront the significance of a mobilities perspective in drawing out aspects of these experiences. It becomes clear that immediate reactions to sexual harassment are often shrouded with doubt and uncertainty, shaped by the spatio-temporalities of the Underground and the sociabilities they induce. As time passes these experiences become embedded into women’s autobiographical memory (Misztal, 2003). This highlights two key points. Firstly, these experiences act to alter mobilities as the memory reminds women of their potential vulnerability in public space. Secondly, however, these accounts also show that, over time, women can become emboldened by these experiences and use the memory to actively reshape boundaries and claim ownership of their personal space in public spaces.
This chapter has shown that the impact these experiences have on women’s mobility is multi-layered, and spatially and temporally implicated. This reveals how sexual harassment forces women to constantly renegotiate their relationship with the city. It is a more subtle undertaking than being instinctively passive or active, disempowered or empowered: the analysis of women’s experiences of sexual harassment and its impact over time, shows that there are latitudes between the two. We have seen how, by not simply focussing on female fear of victimisation, we can do justice to the complex negotiations that women incorporate into their lives in order to mitigate men’s intrusions that pose a threat to their pleasure and freedom ‘on the move’.
- Prelims
- Chapter 1. Introduction: Arrhythmia and Egg Yolk
- Chapter 2. Everyday, Everywhere: Theorising Sexual Harassment
- Chapter 3. Space, Time and Rhythms: Introducing a Mobilities Framework
- Chapter 4. ‘Before’: Gendered Experiences of Urban Space
- Chapter 5. ‘During’: Moments of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground
- Chapter 6. ‘After’: The Impact of Sexual Harassment – Remembering and Resisting Across Time and Space
- Chapter 7. Conclusions: Slowing Down
- References