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This article explores the limitations of criminal legal responses to gender-based violence in Australia, specifically sexual assault law reforms and the criminalisation of coercive control. We demonstrate that carceral horizons deployed to address gender-based violence cause further harm to survivors and overshadow diverse perceptions and practices of justice. We suggest that such an approach is inappropriate and dangerous in the Australian context, given the historical and enduring harms of colonisation and the extent to which the actors within and the structure of the criminal legal system perpetrate violence towards Indigenous survivors of gender-based violence. Drawing on insights from research on survivors’ justice needs, survivors’ experiences in the criminal legal system, and abolitionist, transformative, and Indigenous scholarship, we discuss the potential for alternative ways of conceptualising justice responses in the Australian context that move beyond and avoid further perpetuating the harms arising from criminal legal responses to gender-based violence.

Sexual harassment in the workplace is, unfortunately, an all-too-common experience for women in Australia, with often devastating impacts for victim-survivors' wellbeing and careers (AHRC, 2022). Like other forms of sexual violence, workplace sexual harassment is highly gendered, with women disproportionately impacted and men overwhelmingly the perpetrators of harassment (AHRC 2020, 2022). Existing research suggests that sexual harassment is more prevalent in certain industries, particularly those that are strongly hierarchical and male dominated (AHRC, 2020). The hospitality industry has been identified as one industry with disproportionately high rates of workplace sexual harassment (UWU, 2023).

Street harassment represents one of the most pervasive forms of sexual violence. While it is commonly understood as a gender-based harm, it also intersects with racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and other forms of abuse. Although it is rarely responded to through government policy, research illustrates that street harassment can have profoundly negative impacts of those who experience it. This article provides a comprehensive review of the current "state of the field" of street harassment research. We undertook two extensive searches of the EBSCO Discovery database in 2015 and 2020, followed by the use of reference snowballing and a Google Scholar search in order to triangulate results. Studies included in the sample were published in English, peer-reviewed and centrally focused on street harassment. Dissertations and nongovernmental organization reports were also included due to the small number of studies in this field. One hundred eighty-two sources were included in the final sample. Findings show that publications on this topic have increased substantially across the two reviews. We provide a thematic overview of key research findings to date and argue throughout that current research suffers from conceptual and typological slippage and does not consistently take into account the need for an intersectional analysis. We close with suggestions for future directions in research and practice, given the emergent nature of the field.

Most research on street harassment has focused on the experiences of heterosexual, cisgender women, shaping our understandings of street harassment as a problem of sexism and men’s violence against women. In this article, we examine semi-structured interviews with 25 LGBTQ+ Australians who detailed their experiences of street harassment. We found that LGBTQ+ people experience unique forms, contexts, and trajectories of street harassment that a cisheteronormative gendered framework cannot fully account for. Homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism are drivers that have been under-theorized in street harassment literature. Our findings reiterate the importance of moving beyond over-simplified understandings of gender-based violence and the need to analyze other intersecting forms of marginalization beyond binary conceptualizations of gender.

Despite the pervasive nature of street harassment, there is currently little research exploring who perpetrates street harassment and why. Drawing on interviews with Australians who have experienced street harassment, we examine their insights into perpetration. Participants identified individual-level, social/cultural, structural and contextual factors that facilitate street harassment. While existing theoretical explanations of gendered violence help to account for the perpetration of street harassment, these were not sufficient in accounting for participants’ experiences. Participants often drew on gendered, aged, classed and racial stereotypes in their perceptions of perpetrators. We argue that a nuanced understanding of power that accounts for multiple, intersecting forms of marginalisation is needed to understand who perpetrates, as well as who is perceived to perpetrate street harassment.

A growing body of literature has documented the pervasive occurrence of harassment in schools, and street-based harassment. However, to date there has been little attention to street-based harassment occurring in school-related contexts, such as walking to and from school in uniform. In this article, we aim to address this gap by exploring findings from 47 qualitative interviews with individuals who have experienced street and public harassment in Australia. Street harassment was commonly encountered by participants while they were in their school uniform, and beginning high school was often associated with the onset or increased intensity of street harassment. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power and feminist theorisation on embodiment, we argue that street harassment–and school responses to this harassment–functioned as an ‘informal curriculum’ that normalized the occurrence of harassment and produced young people’s bodies as sites of risk that required surveillance, control, and careful management through engagement in safety work.

Rideshare and taxi services may commonly be perceived as safer modes of travel, particularly in comparison to public transport, and the introduction of rideshare services such as Uber has transformed urban mobilities. Yet, there is emerging anecdotal evidence to suggest that both taxi and rideshare services are sites of sexual harassment and violence. However, little is known about passengers’ perceptions of safety when using taxis and rideshare services, an issue with significant implications for mobility, civic participation and social inclusion. To address this gap, we explore findings from an online survey and one-on-one interviews with rideshare and taxi patrons to examine their perceptions of safety when using taxi and rideshare services and the factors that facilitate or impede feelings of safety, including the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. In closing, we consider the implications of the findings for conceptualisations of safety, developing policy and practice, and future research.

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment ‘knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are ‘knowable’ via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists’ practices, we argue that what constitutes ‘data visualisation’ itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting ‘traditional’ practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications

Community attitudes towards sexual and gender-based violence play a central role in normalising, excusing and minimising perpetrators’ actions, as well as fostering a violence-supportive culture. However, we currently know little regarding how members of the community understand or perceive ‘everyday’ or seemingly ‘minor’ forms of harassment and intrusion, such as street-based harassment, with most research focusing on sexual assault and rape. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods, vignette-based survey with members of the community in Melbourne, Australia. The survey examined participants’ perceptions of five scenarios depicting incidents that might constitute street harassment, including the extent to which participants viewed the scenarios as harmful, complimentary or in breach of social norms, and who bore responsibility for the incident. Findings suggest that participants typically held progressive understandings of harassment, but they nonetheless drew on victim-blaming or minimising discourses at times. In closing, we consider the implications for future research and primary prevention work.

Digital maps have been taken up as a productive tool in both activism and academic research. However, there has been less consideration of their use as a research method in qualitative social sciences research. This paper aims to contribute towards scholarship on qualitative research by providing a critical reflection on the use of digital mapping as a research method in a feminist research project on street-based harassment in Australia. Drawing on practices of reflexivity, as well as comments made by participants across 46 qualitative interviews, I consider how digital mapping can be used to facilitate feminist research, arguing that it represents a generative instrument which lends itself to the development of in-depth insights from participants. Yet, mapping also delimits the epistemological possibilities of qualitative research, and I consider how this method simultaneously constrains what can be known about street harassment.

Given the recent surge of research about sexual violence, it is timely to revisit the role of ethics in this field. This article examines two key frameworks which govern ethics in sexual violence research: institutional risk management and trauma discourse. While recognising the importance of these frameworks, we argue that they share a narrow conceptualisation of the potential harms of sexual violence research. Drawing on the legacy of decades of feminist research on sexual violence, we call for a deeper engagement with ethical and epistemological questions of knowledge, positionality and power. We argue that researchers need to consider the broader social and political contexts that shape survivors’ lives and experiences of disclosure in undertaking ethical research. Sexual violence researchers must also consider the potential harms of their research on marginalised communities – from questioning who is included in research, to the implications of the responses to violence advocated for. Utilising insights from feminist, critical and intersectional traditions – and reflections on our own experiences as sexual violence researchers – we argue for ethical considerations to extend beyond risk management and medicalised trauma frameworks.

Social media and activist sites have provided an avenue to contest the dominant framing of street harassment as “trivial” and have sought to make street harassment and its harms visible. To date, digital activism has been analysed and conceptualised in relation to its potential as a counter-public forum that enables collective action and resistance, political mobilisation, “speaking out” and consciousness raising, and as a site of informal or innovative justice. I aim to build on this literature by examining the potential for the activist sites Hollaback!, @catcallsofnyc and @dearcatcallers to function as a form of “counter-mapping”, contributing towards broader social justice efforts to disrupt and transform dominant productions of space/place. I examine the tensions created by these digital practices, particularly with regards to whether they disrupt the production of space/place or, rather, reinforce urban space as a gendered “threatscape”.

The #MeToo movement sparked a global conversation and moment of reckoning in relation to sexual violence. The hashtag campaign, developed from a tweet sent by actress Alyssa Milano (though the phrase was originally coined by African American activist Tarana Burke some decade earlier), provided a moment for survivors to share their experiences in a context in which they were perhaps more likely to be supported and believed. The #MeToo movement also created an opportunity to engage in a more productive dialogue about the causes and the challenges underpinning the prevention of gender-based violence. Yet, #MeToo has been subject to substantive critique, particularly in relation to modes of representation within media reporting. In addition, there is also little is known about how the #MeToo movement was impactful beyond major urban centres and resonated in regional, rural, and remote (RRR) locations. This article addresses both these issues drawing on a thematic analysis of 70 newspaper articles from RRR newspapers in Australia reporting on or responding to the #MeToo movement. While the data reveals some progressive approaches to documenting how the #MeToo movement impacted some RRR communities, as well as profiling some of the key challenges facing RRR communities in addressing gender-based violence, the specific voices represented in newspaper reporting, continues to reflect the perspectives of white, heterosexual women. We conclude by suggesting further research exploring the nature of reporting on #MeToo in other RRR spaces is needed to understand the full extent to which sexual violence is understood and represented. In addition, more specific work with survivors in RRR Australia and globally is vital to understand the dynamics and complexities of responding to and preventing sexual violence and the challenges associated with the geographies of speaking out.

Research on peer review to date has focused on its role as a formal compliance mechanism, a process for enhancing and developing teaching practice, and as a considerable source of anxiety for educators. In this paper, we draw on scholarly reflections from our experience of undertaking a reciprocal, formative peer review in an Australian higher education setting. Our findings provide novel conceptual, empirical, and practical insights by providing the first application of an appreciative inquiry framework to the process of peer review. We argue that adopting an appreciative inquiry framework assists us in learning from “the best” aspects of our colleagues’ teaching. Moreover, it offers a framework for understanding and responding to some of the challenges long-associated with peer review. In doing so, it presents potential benefits pertaining to student retention and learning outcomes, while opening up new possibilities for researching and practicing peer review.

This edited collection uses the #MeToo movement as a starting point for interrogating contemporary debates in anti-sexual violence activism and justice-seeking.

Gender-based violence (GBV) seems recently to have been almost constantly on the public radar. The global #MeToo movement prompted daily reporting on sexual violence (albeit with a focus often limited to glamorous Hollywood celebrities). In Australia, high-profile cases such as that of Saxon Mullins sparked renewed debate on sexual consent and led to a New South Wales government inquiry. The prominence afforded to GBV in recent public debate may give the impression that progress is being made – that it’s “on the agenda” and our institutional, social and cultural responses to this violence are improving. To a certain extent, this is true.

In January 2018, Chinese women joined the global #MeToo movement to fight sexual harassment and sexual abuse. Unlike its Western counterpart, China’s #MeToo campaign was first introduced and promoted by a group of university students who made public allegations against offending professors. In attempting to expand the scope of the movement nationwide, campaigners have faced unique social and political obstacles. For instance, in order to circumvent rigorous online censorship, activists have to constantly adjust their communication strategies to keep the campaign alive. This chapter critically discusses the particularities of China’s adaptation of the #MeToo campaign, focusing on how it emerged, its successes and limitations, and how it operates within China’s sociopolitical milieu.

Rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are increasing in older cohorts in Western countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, suggesting a need to examine the safer sex knowledge and practices of older people. This article presents findings from 53 qualitative interviews from the study Sex, Age, and Me: A National Study of Sex and Relationships Among Australians Aged 60+. Participants were recruited through an online national survey. We consider how participants understood “safer sex,� the importance of safer sex to them, the safer sex practices they used (and the contexts in which they used them), and the barriers to using safer sex. Older adults had diverse understandings, knowledge, and use of safer sex practices, although participants tended to focus most strongly on condom use. Having safer sex was strongly mediated by relationship context, trust, perceived risk of contracting an STI, concern for personal health, and stigma. Common barriers to safer sex included erectile difficulties, embarrassment, stigma, reduced pleasure, and the lack of a safer sex culture among older people. The data presented have important implications for sexual health policy, practice, and education and health promotion campaigns aimed at improving the sexual health and well-being of older cohorts.

© 2018 Taylor & Francis. Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have risen among older people in Australia and other countries. To guide future initiatives, we examined sources of information that older people use or are willing to use for knowledge about safer sex and STIs, including whether there are any gender differences. A total of 2137 Australian adults aged 60+ years completed a nationwide survey. Analyses focused on participants who were at risk of an STI (n = 686; 220 women and 466 men). Overall, information-seeking on STIs in the last year was low (18% men; 15% women). When sought, common sources included general media outlets (e.g., magazines, TV), healthcare providers (HCPs), and the Internet. HCPs were the most relied upon source among both women and men. Brochures, websites, and HCPs were rated highest as future sources; however, women indicated they were more willing than men to have information provided by brochures and websites. STI information-seeking was generally low, but there was willingness among both men and women to use a range of sources for gaining future information.