“I want to be able to walk the street without fear”: Transforming justice for street harassment

Fileborn, B.; Vera-Gray, F.

doi:10.1007/s10691-017-9350-3

“I want to be able to walk the street without fear”: Transforming justice for street harassment

Fileborn, B.; Vera-Gray, F.

Authors

B. Fileborn

F. Vera-Gray

Abstract

The practices comprising the analytic category of street harassment are rarely responded to through either criminal or restorative justice approaches, and the possibilities for transformative justice have to date not been considered. In this article we advocate for a victim-centred justice response to street harassment, specifically examining the potential for transformative justice to function in this way. Drawing on data from a recent Australian study, we examine participants’ understandings of justice and desired justice responses to street harassment. Participants’ responses drew attention to a range of perceived shortcomings of the formal justice system as a mechanism for responding to street harassment. Instead, participants advocated for a justice response concerned with transforming cultural and structural norms, in particular gender norms. We end in an examination of the limitations of transformative justice, looking to recent work on “kaleidoscopic justice” as a way of transforming common conceptions of justice itself.

Citation

Fileborn, B., & Vera-Gray, F. (2017). “I want to be able to walk the street without fear”: Transforming justice for street harassment. Feminist Legal Studies, 25(2), 203-227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9350-3

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 17, 2017
Online Publication Date	Jul 5, 2017
Publication Date	Jul 5, 2017
Deposit Date	Jun 27, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Jun 28, 2017
Journal	Feminist Legal Studies
Print ISSN	0966-3622
Electronic ISSN	1572-8455
Publisher	Springer
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	25
Issue	2
Pages	203-227
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9350-3

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.