AUTHOR PRE-PRINT DO NOT CITE To reference consult published version http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2016.04.001 Women's Studies International Forum 58 (2016) 9–17 1 Men’s Stranger Intrusions: Rethinking street harassment F. Vera-Gray Abstract Women’s experiences of intrusive men in public space, popularly termed ‘street harassment’, is one of the most understudied yet commonly experienced forms of violence against women. Despite acknowledgement of its importance, an explicit debate on naming – with an exploration of how language creates both openings and restrictions of what can be said – is yet to be had in the literature. This paper begins this conversation, detailing the benefits and challenges in current terminology, and exploring the possibilities of reframing the most common dynamic in street harassment as men’s stranger intrusions on women in public space. Keywords Street harassment; violence against women; sexual violence; public space; men’s intrusion; fear of crime Introduction During the 1970s, key feminist texts began to raise the issue of men’s violence against women and girls in its criminal and mundane manifestations. Susan Brownmiller (1975) theorised rape as a tool of social control and Germaine Greer (1971) used the concept of ‘petty rapes’ to describe the ways in which the everyday and the presumed rare ‘sledgehammer’ (Stanko, 1985) experiences of men’s intrusion were connected. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminist research and activism combined to substantially build the knowledge base and theoretical frameworks available for understanding men’s violence against women (Kelly, 2011). Key contributors highlighted the danger in relegating such practices to a set of aberrant behaviours of a deviant minority of men, pointing to the importance of recognising the ordinary forms of men’s violence (Hanmer & Saunders, 1984; Kelly, 1988; Stanko, 1985; 1990; Wise & Stanley, 1987). Yet despite this early acknowledgment, women’s experiences of intrusive men in public space remains an understudied area. Empirical studies of what is commonly known as ‘street harassment’, its prevalence, manifestations, harms, and the meanings it holds for both the men who practice it and the women who experience it, are few. Reasons for the sparse academic treatment across disciplines include: trivialisation (Tuerkheimer, 1997; West, 1987); normalisation (Bowman, 1993, Larkin, 1997); and the ways in which rules of conduct public and semi-public places do not receive the same scrutiny as practices in private places (Gardner, 1995; Goffman, 1990; Lenton, Smith, Fox & Morra, 1999). Terminologic difficulties also explain the relative silence, given the expansion in the knowledge base on other forms of men’s violence against women. The lack of agreement on what constitutes the phenomenon, how to name it, and how to conceptualise the harm, presents problems for survey methodologies and complicates comparison between studies. Despite acknowledging its importance, an explicit debate on naming – with an exploration of how language creates both openings and restrictions of what can be said – is yet to take place. This paper seeks to carve a space for such a discussion. I first review the disparities in how the phenomenon is named and defined, identifying the relative silence on the limitations and benefits of existing terminology, even within studies recognising the problem of bringing women’s experience into language. This problem was met in earlier campaigns to recognise