Framing street harassment: legal developments and popular misogyny in social media

Abstract

In September 2015, following the ratification of Istanbul Convention by Portugal, addressing someone with unwanted verbal “sexual proposals” became a criminal offence. This however, barely meets the requirements of the treaty and is far from what was first discussed about sexual harassment both in the Portuguese Parliament and more broadly in the media. When the criminalization of “piropo”—the Portuguese colloquial word for “catcalling”—was first proposed, it sparked heated opposition in online discussions, revealing strong prejudices against women and anti-feminist sentiments. Aiming to contribute to the understudied area of street harassment, this article maps the ways in which its legal developments were framed and counter-framed between August 2013 and September 2018, corresponding to the period before, during and after its adoption. Methodologically, we worked through the combination of quantitative and interpretative methods in order to understand gender politics in public policy making, through the study of news media texts and readers’ comments posted on Facebook. We argue that whereas feminist interpretations found their way into media texts, reader’s discussions expressed the popular misogyny that shaped the law reform.