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Notes -
I know that several Mottizens are American attorneys--have we got any solicitors or barristers about?
This week I've seen a couple of articles about Surrey policewomen posing as joggers to catch men harassing women out exercising. This is ostensibly to combat "violence against women," and this particular article's subheading reads:
As an American, my instinct was that this had to be sloppy (or deliberately misleading) reporting. For an expressive act like catcalling to rise to the level of unlawful harassment in the United States would require either a severe single incident, or (more often) a pattern of unwanted behavior and either actual or constructive ("a reasonable person would know") knowledge on the part of the harasser that the behavior was in fact unwanted. I know the UK lacks anything like the protection afforded to Americans by the First Amendment, but they aren't entirely without speech protections. Sure enough, the article seems to suggest that most men do just get "educated" (I assume a stern talking-to, maybe a pamphlet?) while the 18 arrests are for something more like actual assault. But attempting to ascertain the state of "catcalling" law in the UK sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
According to one article, the "first London fine for catcalling [was] dished out after undercover operation" in 2022. This was an application of a "Public Space Protection Order" (PSPO), which makes "certain anti social activities within a mapped area prosecutable"--including such diverse things as noisy supercars, protesting near abortion clinics, and "kerb crawling." Anyway this fine (£100) was issued to a man for making a "sexually suggestive remark to a woman in a late-night takeaway."
So, neither apparently severe nor an established pattern of unwanted behavior! With specific regard to harassment, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (PDF) suggests that any "unwanted behaviour directed at an individual with the purpose or intent of humiliating, disrespecting, intimidation [sic], hurting or offending them" qualifies, even if it is a single incident. The laws I was able to find use slightly different language, suggesting that harassment is anything a reasonable person thinks harassment is, plus "alarming the person or causing the person distress"--but also suggests that a "course of conduct" must include "at least two occasions in relation to that person" or "on at least one occasion in relation to each of" two or more persons in a group. But all of that may be moot, if these PSPOs are not specifically dealing in harassment law, but instead are more general mandates against whatever "antisocial" behavior local politicians can be convinced to be concerned about.
This is of course related to a common hack in "Common Law" jurisdictions with "reasonable person" standards: if you conduct a successful campaign to shift people's attitudes, you can actually change the law without ever changing the law. And people's attitudes are apparently changing! After the 2022 London fine, other parts of the UK took up the cause and expanded the penalties; the £100 fine was presumably deemed insufficiently punitive, and in 2024 the city of Bradford boasted of seizing four cars in a "catcalling crackdown."
Not everyone is impressed with this use of police resources. But what brought me up short, personally, was the asymmetry of it all.
I don't really understand catcalling, in approximately the same way I don't understand smoking, or aggressive driving--that is, I know that some people's preferences run that way, but I'm pretty sure it's because those people are to that degree some combination of stupid and inconsiderate. Particularly when a woman is on foot and her, uh, admirers are in a car, it is unequivocally terrifying to be abruptly shouted (or worse, honked) at from a moving vehicle. Wolf whistles from men on foot are less immediately terrifying but can portend a different sort of danger, and England has certainly had its share of sex assault scandals. So I rather see the objection to such behavior!
But in drawing the line between "inconsiderate" and "criminal offense," it feels like the UK has opted for an approach that caters primarily to outrage merchants and the terminally online, rather than to their own community norms. If you were a culture warrior back in 2014, you might remember "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman," which generated pushback from diverse angles (most of the men in the video were not white, a repeat of the experiment in hijab showed reduced harassment, a similar video taken in Mumbai recorded no instances of overt harassment, etc.). There seem to be cultural, demographic, and/or geographical contexts in which catcalling happens or does not happen, and "when women are exercising in public" seems to be the currently contested context, at least in the UK.
So where I find myself uncomfortable is in the way that the press and, presumably, the police PR are clearly tying catcalling, wolf whistles, and even sexual comments together with simple and sexual assault. The articles often admit, somewhere on page 3, that a lot of the objectionable behavior isn't (maybe can't be) prosecuted, but instead met with "education" efforts. "Did you know this frightens women?" Well, hashtag-not-all-women, surely? Rather like the epidemic of "dick pics" on dating apps, actually--"if today I catcall a hundred women and one of them flashes me her boobs, tomorrow I'll catcall a thousand women?"
In other words, "male sexual strategy," such as it is, is understandably disconcerting to women (especially when the men don't know the rules), but the reverse is also true. Women dressing in form-fitting or revealing clothing and parading themselves in full view of the public is something that some men find "alarming" or "distressing." You can see the result of laws that seek to minimize that distress. Is this just down to "women in the West were oppressed in the past, therefore it's fine to flip the script?"
My own personal position is that these are things that should not be decided by law, but by norms. If the 18 men arrested in Surrey were all arrested for touching a woman without clear invitation to do so, then I have no particular objection to their arrest (beyond the slight stench of entrapment that all "sting" operations inevitably report to my senses). But (if indeed this is happening) law enforcement officers dressing people down for a wolf whistle, much less fining them, much less throwing them in prison, seems excessively aggressive given the interest on the other side. To be overtly sexually attractive, in public, and never have anyone comment on this in any way might be nice, but it hardly seems like the sort of thing one can reasonably demand be enforced by law. And using the media to disingenuously suggest to men that they are under real risk of serious punishment, not for sexual assault alone but even for comparatively innocuous, annoyingly antisocial behaviors like catcalling, has us wandering out into "actual psyop" territory.
Can you elaborate on this bit? I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
Setting the legal debate aside (I find myself not too sure of my views on what the laws should be in this area), I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass, and a fairly significant difference between actively getting into someone's space by catcalling them and just being seen by them as you go about your own business.
The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
(Fun fact: Australia used to require protruding labia to be removed from pornographic displays, so even in contexts where it was legal to display female genitalia, it was not legal to do so with complete anatomical accuracy! I have seen it argued that this may have contributed to the rise of cosmetic labiaplasties.)
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
("But you shouldn't think of something like exercise clothing as sexually provocative!" "No, you shouldn't think of something like catcalling as provocative!" Etc.)
I think it's more an active vs passive thing.
A cat-caller actively intrudes into the life of the random passerby. They do this intentionally by inserting (hah) themselves into the life of another.
The bikini clad ass may upset the Amish or Muslim man, but it doesn't force them to look. It's a passive object in their life they can choose to interact (hah) with or not.
I guess the counter is you have to first notice the bikini to then ignore it, but I again just have a very hard time not finding a someone deliberately taking action (making noise that is in 99% of cases unwanted and coded as threatening) to be anywhere near equivalent as someone getting annoyed as to what someone else is wearing.
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