Street harassment and the violence continuum thesis. Lessons from policies targeting incivility

This article revisits the constitution of street harassment as a public problem in France, and analyses more specifically how the ideas of “sexual harassment” and “continuum of violence” have been mobilised through this process. In the case of street harassment, these concepts have contributed to the construction of a “public” and a cause, by dramatising a series of gestures and words hitherto conceived as negligible. This dramatisation proved decisive in the process of politicisation (publicising a collective female experience) but it still raises difficulties when considering the public responses to the problem thus configured. We would like to nurture today’s open reflections on the political and judicial treatment of street harassment, on the basis of the insights stemming from theories and policies aimed at incivilities. Prevalent in France (and elsewhere in Europe) from the 1990s, from the importation of North American models, these struggles have leaned towards conceptions of urban public order, and of the articulation between the minor forms of deviance and serious crime, which share several features with the ideas used to justify the criminalisation of street harassment. The identification of these analogies sheds light on both the benefits and costs of today’s dominant approaches to street harassment, including the political (and legal) use of the concept of the continuum of violence.