Denouncing “Aggressive Sharks” or Promoting Open Discussion: The Implementation of Street Harassment Awareness Campaigns in the Netherlands and France

In the spring and early summer of 2018, the walls of Paris’ metro stations were covered with large posters, showing huge sharks, wolves and bears preying on fear-stricken young women. On the posters, the French public transport providers incited travelers to “never minimize sexual harassment.” In Amsterdam, a campaign was launched against street harassment in June 2017, consisting of various banners and articles that encourage (mostly young) persons to discuss with each other what they find acceptable and unacceptable behavior. “Is ‘hey hottie’ ok? When does it go too far to you?” Amsterdam public officials that made the campaign explain that they wanted to refrain from being “moralizing” and “paternalistic,” preferring a campaign that would incite open discussion about everyone’s personal boundaries to one in which they would “normatively impose a specific norm themselves.” These two campaigns illustrate that, although we frequently speak about a global increase in awareness and governmental action on street harassment, there are enormous contextual differences in how awareness- raising is conceived. While French state feminists diffused the message that harassment is a form of violence against women and masculine domination, Dutch public officials tried to promote public discussion of what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior, trying to avoid imposing a norm. Why do virtually all French governmental campaigns against street harassment speak of a need to sanction harassers, portray them as predators, and incite us to stop minimizing the problem and blame the victim, while Dutch campaigns call for an open discussion and reflexivity about your and other persons’ personal boundaries? On the basis of detailed media and policy document analysis, 86 interviews with public officials, politicians, and activists involved in the political work required to create these campaigns, as well as 200 hours of ethnographic observations of meetings organized by these actors, I show how these campaigns are not only the product of very different understandings of what the street harassment problem is, but also different ways of dealing with a difficulty that is central to debates on street harassment: how to address the problem of street harassment and create policies to effectively combat it, while avoiding the stigmatization of ethnic minority men? The actors involved in the creation of these campaigns repeatedly indicate that trying to deal with this risk of stigmatization was a key preoccupation in their work and steered the way in which they gave form to awareness-raising policies. Their work attests to the difficulties of raising awareness on street harassment in an era of extensive debates on the stigmatizing effects of some ways of addressing gender equality and gendered violence, a development that different authors have characterized as homo-nationalism, sexual democracy , sexual nationalism, or femo- nationalism.