Introduction

Sexual harassment has become a high-profile issue in recent years across a range of cultural contexts, including through the global rise of the #MeToo movement and the Everyday Sexism project. The UK (and elsewhere) has seen regular media coverage of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and other forms of gender violence across many different sectors (organized sport; organized religion; social and child welfare services and the entertainment industry, to name just a few) (Anitha and Lewis, 2018, p 5), as well as the shocking rape and murder of Sarah Everard by an acting British Police Officer and murder of London schoolteacher Sabina Nessa in 2021. Meanwhile awareness about the prevalence of sexual harassment within spaces of higher education (including within geography programs specifically) has also risen (Batty et al, 2017; Mansfield et al, 2019), with research suggesting that up to three out of every five university students in the UK have been sexually harassed or assaulted at some point (Busby, 2018).

From the perspective of the ‘right to everyday life’ (Beebeejaun, 2017) and right to the city (Fenster, 2005), this state of affairs can only be viewed as an abject failure. Fear of sexual harassment can limit movement for women and other feminized and gender diverse subjects, and freedom from harassment is a basic human right and precondition to mental and physical health and well-being. In the UK, concern about this issue has now attracted the attention of policy makers at the highest levels, leading to a Parliamentary Inquiry in 2018 on sexual harassment in public places, and a briefing paper on sexual harassment in higher education from the House of Commons in 2018. All of this highlights the urgent need for both deeper understanding – and cultural change – on this issue.

This chapter provides a critical reading of contemporary scholarship on sexual harassment within and beyond geography in order to contextualize activisms combatting sexual harassment across different settings and spaces in the UK and beyond. With our expertise in understanding issues to do with gender, power, and space, I argue that feminist geographers have a potential role to play in this work. Sexual harassment connects to a number of key conceptual frames in contemporary human geography.