Although street harassment is increasingly recognised as a problem and subject to regulation, how this problem is defined, and what regulation entails, varies from one context to the other. At midnight on Saturday 9 March , around people marched through the centre of Leiden in protest against sexual violence and street harassment. The march was organised in response to three recent incidents of sexual violence against women, including the rape of a young woman on Breestraat, a street in central Leiden.
Notably, many media reports on the march and the related incidents mentioned sexual assault and street harassment in combination. However, this link has not been systematically made in attempts to criminalise street harassment.
In the s, NGOs such as Hollaback! The global increase β from India to New York β in awareness of street harassment has also resonated on the European continent. In , Flemish student Sofie Peeters used a hidden camera to film the harassment she experienced while walking through the streets of Brussels, in a documentary evocatively titled Femme de la rue.
Street harassment then operates as an effective instrument for policing gender boundaries and effectively limits access to public spaces. Defining street harassment as a public problem involves protecting equal access to public spaces for all. The documentary Femme de la Rue played a key role in putting the issue of street harassment on the agenda in Brussels and other European political arenas.
Laws aimed at criminalising this kind of behaviour have been introduced in Portugal , France , Spain , and most recently, the Netherlands Interestingly, the legal trajectories in these countries have varied depending on how the issue was framed in public discourse.
