Women, Harassment and Reaction A Study of Female Student's Experience and Reactions to Street Harassment Using Mixed Methods

Street harassment is a form of forbidden discrimination against women which turns public places into an unsafe and undesirable environment for their social activities. Women's silence while facing these kinds of harassments is considered as a reason for the prevalence of such acts in the society. So studying the women's experiences of street harassment and their responses to harassment seems to be essential.The present study on the female students of Shiraz University has been conducted using exploratory "qualitative-quantitative" design. The research problem was explored through depth interviews, in order to familiarize the researchers with the participant's mental meaning, experiences and point of views, in the qualitative part of this study. Afterward, the results of the qualitative part (N = 369) were used to develop the theoretical framework, and the quantitative instrument, the questionnaire.According to the qualitative interviews results, a classification of different kinds of street harassment in public places was made, including 4 main categories: visual, verbal, following and touching harassments. The participants of the qualitative part had experienced verbal and visual harassments more frequently than the other kinds, and this finding was very similar to the quantitative results. According to the respondents of the quantitative part, the visual harassment is the most frequent, followed by verbal, touching and following harassments. Additionally, in case of the respondent's reactions to street harassment, the quantitative results showed that most of the respondents (about %70) respond to the harassment passively. It means most of them preferred to stay silent while confronting a kind of harassment, and this finding agrees with qualitative results, too.