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The Urban Characteristics of Street Harassment: A First Look

Published:03 November 2015Publication History

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.

References

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  1. The Urban Characteristics of Street Harassment: A First Look

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      UrbanGIS'15: Proceedings of the 1st International ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Analytics
      November 2015
      128 pages
      ISBN:9781450339735
      DOI:10.1145/2835022

      Copyright © 2015 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 3 November 2015

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