ABSTRACT
Street harassment is a global problem. In this paper, we seek to gain insights into the characteristics of neighborhoods in which street harassment has occurred. We analyze over 7,800 worldwide street harassment incidents, gathered by the Hollaback project [7], to study the association of street harassment with walkability scores and the number of transit routes in the area surrounding the incident. This unveils a number of key insights. First, we show that more than 50% of the incidents occur in highly walkable areas with walkability scores ranging from 90 to 100, and that nonintuitively, as the walkability score increases, the probability of street harassment events increases. The same result is obtained for areas with high transit scores. Further, the number of transit routes within one mile of the harassment incident has a negative correlation with the number of incidents. The insights gained from our study are a step towards understanding where harassment is likely to occur, which we hope can one day be used for prevention of future incidents.
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Index Terms
The Urban Characteristics of Street Harassment: A First Look
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