Combatting insecurity in the everyday: the global anti-street harassment movement as everyday security practitioners

Desborough, Karen and Weldes, Jutta 2023. Combatting insecurity in the everyday: the global anti-street harassment movement as everyday security practitioners. Critical Studies on Security 11 (3) , pp. 145-160. 10.1080/21624887.2023.2248435

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Abstract

Street harassment renders countless women, girls and others insecure in their everyday lives. Over the past two decades a global grassroots movement developed to combat street harassment and its attendant insecurities. But neither phenomenon has excited the attention of Security Studies, critical or otherwise. In this paper, we focus on the global anti-street harassment movement, conceptualising its activists as ‘everyday security practitioners’ who, like privileged security practitioners in the state or the academy, theorise street harassment and devise and implement strategies to tackle it. In so doing we argue that Security Studies should pay more attention to the everyday, to insecurities like street harassment, and to such ‘everyday security practitioners’. To illustrate this argument we first define street harassment. We then consider Security Studies and its exclusion of the everyday. To argue for its inclusion in Security Studies, we explicate the diverse insecurities produced by street harassment, conceptualise 'everyday security practitioners’, and provide some illustrations of strategies deployed by the global anti-street harassment movement both to bring street harassment to wider public attention as a pervasive everyday insecurity and to combat it. We conclude with two suggestions for Security Studies.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Academic & Student Support Service
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	2162-4887
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 October 2023
Last Modified:	11 Dec 2023 15:47
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/163261

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