Politicizing street harassment The constitution of a public problem in the Netherlands and France

This dissertation traces how street harassment became an object of debate and policy in the Netherlands and France. The research is based on interviews held with the main actors involved in this public problem—politicians, policymakers, activists, scholars, and journalists—observation of meetings they organized, and analysis of newspaper, policy, activist, and research documents. If in the last ten years street harassment has become the object of public condemnation in the Netherlands and France, what explains how its politicization produced so much uneasiness and polarization and that local responses to address it have varied so greatly? While scholars studying public problems and processes of victimization focus mostly on the positive goals actors try to accomplish, actors working on street harassment often expressed wanting to avoid specific ways of dealing with the issue. I propose to analyze such avoidance behavior using the term “apprehension.” Although an essentialist notion of “national models” should be avoided, similarities in how actors within each country dealt with street harassments show that embeddedness in the institutions of a nation do shape behavior. In France, feminist activists were the first moral entrepreneurs on the problem, framing it as a question of male domination. In the Netherlands, right-wing politicians put the issue on the political agenda and framed it as a problem created by loitering youth with specific migration backgrounds. The dissertation proposes a configurational account of “national culture” that puts emphasis on interaction: a high degree of national homogeneity or the lack thereof can be explained by the degree of interdependency between arenas.