Responding to experiences of public harassment for accessible, safe and inclusive transport

Description

Experiences of harassment are common across the different spaces of people’s mobility. Most often, it is vulnerable groups of people who are targeted on the basis of their marginal identity, such as their disability, ethnicity or race, sexuality, religion or transgender identity. Women experience harassment more commonly than men and in a form that is more likely to be sexualised. Harassment is often enacted and experienced on the basis of intersecting identities, a concept that has gained rapid traction among feminist scholars and advocates of women’s rights. Yet, there is no legislation in the UK that enables the sentencing of a perpetrator of harassment or hate crime based on hostility to more than one identity or aggravated by misogyny. Nor is there legislation in the UK that enables a perpetrator to be convicted of sexual harassment, many incidents of which are not recognised as criminal behaviour. Despite these significant limitations in the law and policing of harassment, transport operators and other stakeholders are taking action to respond to incidents, but is it enough?

Period	25 Apr 2023
Held at	University of Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Degree of Recognition	Local