Nielsen's article on "Ordinary" Citizens, Street Harassment

Nielsen's article Situating Legal Consciousness: Experiences and Attitudes of Ordinary Citizens about Law and Street Harassment is a study conducted on 100 people in the California area about their experience with street harassment – sexually-suggestive comments, race-related comments, begging – and their beliefs regarding the law, including if it should involve itself in the practice. The author explains four reasons that respondents give for not believing that the law should limit street harassment: the First Amendment, autonomy, impracticality, and distrust of authority. The First Amendment means that people believe that freedom of speech includes harassment and that they are not willing to give up this freedom in order to avoid the harassment. Autonomy means that people – especially women – want equality and believe that involving the law with this issue means admitting that they are not equipped to deal with it. Rather, this is considered a personal issue to some respondents, and they feel that individuals should handle it, rather than involving the law. Impracticality means that the interviewees do not think it would be possible or rational to punish every single person who commits street harassment for their misdeed; in fact, many in our class who blogged last week talked about how the legal processes took enough time already, so adding this issue might further slow down the system. Lastly, some respondents admitted to distrusting the authority, or cynicism about the law in general. This means that it is believed that invoking the law will either cannot really help, or it will end up causing more damage to the person it intended to help.

This article interested me because the numbers were fascinating. From a racial standpoint, 4 percent of whites named distrust of authority as their reason for opposing legal regulation of offensive speech, compared to 28 percent of people of color. 80 percent of white men listed the First Amendment for their primary reason for opposing legal regulation, while 56 percent of African-American men named distrust of authority. While Nielsen indicates that there are racial, gender, and class lines that affect people’s experiences and opinions of street harassment, the numbers only further whet my appetite. Is this distrust of authority simply based on race, one’s experience with street harassment, or the combination? 28 percent of women listed autonomy as their primary reason for opposing regulation, compared to 3 percent of men. Again, it becomes obvious that gender plays a role in people’s experiences with and opinions on street harassment. I think it would be interesting to test, if possible, if race or gender is more an indicator of people’s experiences with and opinions on street harassment. The study overall opened a lot of spaces in my mind about gender and race, as well as what people will accept, due to the inequalities they likely experience within society, and how they deal with it.