Street Harassment as a Public Problem: The Circulation of Policy Frames and Solutions in Europe

Supranational organizations working on street harassment face the challenge of developing initiatives to address this issue around the world, while considering local specificities in what exactly is locally understood to be the problem.

An ethnographic study of the production and circulation of policy frames of and solutions to street harassment, HarassEU contributes to our understanding of how policies and frames travel, and how governmental and non-governmental organizations operating on a local, national, and supranational level negotiate the nature of a problem and how to address it.

Based at KU Leuven’s Centre for Sociological Research, the project is supervised by Prof. Giselinde Kuipers, a renowned scholar in comparative and cultural sociology.

It includes a secondment at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies at Sciences Po Paris supervised by Prof. Anne Revillard, an expert in public policy and gender.

The empirical investigation concerns the production of policy initiatives within supranational organizations working on this issue in Europe, as well as how supranational, national, and local organizations interact through case studies of four national contexts: the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy.

Relating research in gender studies to scholarship in pragmatic sociology and political science on processes of politicization allows HarassEU to deliver innovative results not only with respect to our understanding of the problem of street harassment, but also to provide original contributions to scholarship on public problems and policy agenda formation, globalization and international circulation, and gender and ethnicity.

The analysis of tensions that organizations operating on different levels encounter in interacting with each other provides the basis for policy recommendations on how to more effectively build transnational coalitions to combat street harassment and other social problems.