Mind the Gender Gap: A Mobilities Perspective of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground

Using a mobilities framework, this book aims to tell the stories of sexual harassment on the London Underground not as a single, exceptional moment, but as part of women’s wider urban experiences and movements through public urban life. The way this book is structured attempts to mirror and portray this. As such, the chapters that follow this one take such an approach: the before, the during and the after. Prior to this, two chapters are dedicated to the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that are employed to make sense of women’s experiences. In this introductory chapter, I overview the issue of sexual harassment on public transport more broadly. I situate the phenomenon in its social context of a global endemic of violence against women, before zooming in to ‘set the scene’ of the London Underground. I will briefly outline the conceptual framework I use to understand sexual harassment on the London Underground and summarise how situating the issue at the axis of mobilities, rhythms, space and time, allows new insights into how sexual harassment happens ‘on the move’. I then summarise the methodological approach taken for the research that constitutes this book, including a consideration of researcher positionality and ethics. I also make a case for the value of ‘messy’ qualitative, reflexive approaches, and how this is essential for disrupting normative and ‘taken for granted’ conceptions of sexual harassment. I argue that, by giving space to the complexity of women’s in-depth, kinetic stories, we are rewarded with a deeper understanding of the anticipation, manifestation and reaction to incidents of sexual harassment on public transport.

This chapter delves into our past and current understandings of sexual harassment as a form of gender-based violence and examines sociological theorisations of the issue, with a focus on feminist perspectives. I begin by exploring the varying definitions of sexual harassment over time, paying particular attention to how these types of behaviour are understood across contexts, including organisational settings and workplaces, and public spaces like the streets. I will finish the chapter by exploring how the issue has been understood in transport settings thus far, acknowledging the developments and limitations of existing theorisations. This paves the way for the following chapter, that argues for the application of a new lens on an ‘old’ issue.

This chapter introduces the conceptual framework that I use throughout the rest of the book. Taking a mobilities perspective and focussing on space, temporalities and rhythm, I use this framework to develop our understanding of the way in which sexual harassment is feared, anticipated, experienced, negotiated and remembered in the complex setting of public transport. It problematises the way in which these experiences are often viewed as static and contained (both literally and figuratively), despite happening on the move and blurring time–space boundaries. Applying this framework to women’s empirical accounts that are presented in subsequent chapters offers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the before, during and after of a specific incident of sexual harassment.

This chapter draws on empirical data from women’s stories as we start on the ‘journey’ of experiences of sexual harassment. This chapter focusses on the ‘before’, as I present women’s accounts of everyday life moving around London and participating in the rhythmic ensemble of the city. It demonstrates how the city remains a gendered environment that induces both fear and freedom and contextualises the (physical and mental) landscape in which incidents of sexual harassment occur. I will draw on theoretical approaches relating to the emergence of urban modernity in order to contextualise how the social, spatial and temporal conditions in the historical metropolis led to the advent of new sociabilities and modes of being in public life that still influence interactions today. Acknowledging that this remains gendered, I call on the literary character of the flâneur to critically analyse women’s past and present mobilities in the city. I simultaneously incorporate Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm to illustrate how the anticipation and expectation of sexual harassment impact women’s mobilities so intimately that it constitutes their normative urban rhythms. By exploring women’s wider lives in the context of movement and mobilities in the city, this chapter demonstrates the gendered nature of everyday life in the urban environment, including how the anticipation and perceived risk of sexual harassment are experienced and negotiated as an omnipresent possibility.

This chapter focusses on the ‘during’ – the actual corporeal experiences of sexual harassment on the London Underground. I explore these ‘moments’ in detail, the nitty gritty complexity of these experiences that often hold vulnerability, fear, resistance, anger and ambivalence all at once. As considered above, this ‘messiness’ can be lost in quantitative work, to the detriment of a nuanced understanding of sexual harassment. I continue to explore and understand these moments through the lens of mobility, again operationalising Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and Cresswell’s (2010) concept of friction in order to draw out key conceptual observations that are specific to how sexual harassment manifests in a public transport environment. Using a framework that has movement and mobilities at its core, this chapter links sexual harassment to spatial and temporal elements of the broader city and its transport system. In doing so, it shows how these multiple rhythms coalesce to create the conditions within which sexual harassment is perpetrated and experienced in a certain and particular way. The framework illustrates how harassment is, in part spatially implicated, facilitated or hindered by the spaces and paces of the city.

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.

This chapter draws the book to a close by returning to the overarching goal of this book – to understand women’s experiences of sexual harassment on the London Underground. It brings together the key findings from each chapter. At its core, this book is about deepening and expanding our understanding of sexual harassment on public transport. However, by following the continuous thread of gendered mobilities, we can depart from expected lines of enquiry, broadening our focus to conjoin seemingly disparate conceptual and theoretical approaches and draw out the nuances of these experiences. So much is revealed through intimate observation of the seemingly mundane – an empty train carriage, the space between strangers, and the invisible rhythms that regulate and play out through our corporeal bodies. This is where we must look to further our enquiries and honour the complexity of these experiences. Along a similar vein, I hope this book demonstrates the continued need to offer space to women’s subjective and experiential stories as a form of rich empirical qualitative data, and how we must fight for the space and time to do this against the temporal latitudes of the neoliberal university.