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Abstract

This article responds to recent calls for a ‘sensory criminology’ by offering a multi-sensorial analysis of gender-based violence (GBV). We examine both the often-discussed external senses as well as the more marginalized internal senses and explore how emotion, the broader criminological ‘atmosphere’ of GBV and the shift in atmosphere during the Covid-19 pandemic are implicated in women’s experiences of street-based sexual harassment and sexual assault. By analysing over 140 stories of GBV during the Covid-19 lockdowns, we evidence the scope and value of a fully multi-sensory criminology.

Keywords

domestic violence femicide intimate partner violence qualitative research sexual harassment victimization

I remember each of these occasions not only as an experience of being violated, but as a sensory event that was too overwhelming to process at the time. I can still hear the sound of the voices, the car as it slowed down, the bike that rushed past, the door that opened, the sound of the footsteps, the kind of day it was, the quiet hum of a plane as I woke up. Senses can be magnified, sometimes after the event …. You begin to feel a pressure, this relentless assault on the senses; a body in touch with a world can become a body that fears the touch of a world. The world is experienced as sensory intrusion. It is too much (Ahmed, 2017, p. 23).

Mainstream criminology is often criticized for failing to take sufficient account of the full sensory experience of crime and victimization, with any focus on the sensory mainly confined to the visual and the ways that crime and punishment are given meaning through ‘the spectacle’ (Carrabine, 2012). This focus is underpinned by the rationale that crime is an intensely visual experience, such that ‘visual criminology’ has emerged as its own innovative approach (e.g., Carrabine, 2012, 2015; McClanahan, 2021; Wheeldon, 2021). In response to this perceived ‘occularcentrism’, some criminologists have called for a sensory approach that goes beyond the visual and situates criminology in the context of sound, smell, taste and touch (Lee et al., 2022). For example, McClanahan and South (2020) argue that criminologists’ focus on the visual has been to the detriment of understanding how the other senses are implicated in experiences of crime and victimization. Indeed, given how closely the senses interact, the prioritization of a single sense does not, to coin a phrase, make sense. With its foundations in the sociologies and anthropologies of the senses (Simmel, 1907; Stoller, 1997; Vannini et al., 2011) Sensory Criminology claims to offer an approach to understanding crime that is both theoretically and methodologically transformative (Herrity et al., 2021, 2022).

However, a focus on the sensory has always been present in feminist approaches to crime, most notably in the recognition of state-sanctioned violence against women and girls that is enabled within penal institutions (Howe, 1994). Examples include Russell and Carlton’s (2020) examination of sonic protest strategies in a women’s prison, Chamberlen’s (2016, 2017) examinations of the sensory-tactile components of self-harm and punishment in women’s prison, and Jewkes and Laws’ (2021) inquiry into ‘sensory intrusions’ in a women’s prison. Concurrently, feminists have always been at the forefront of researching the global problem of gender-based violence and oppression, often with a focus on subjective (gendered) experiences, embodiment and corporeality that are often central to many feminist epistemologies (de Beauvoir, 1953; hooks, 1994; Stanley & Wise, 2002). Subsequently, the sensorial is often woven implicitly into feminist analyses of the social control of women (Bordo, 1993; Conboy et al., 1997). A powerful example of this is in Sara Ahmed’s chapter titled ‘Feminism is sensational’ from her book Living a Feminist Life (2017), which is rife with sensorial and embodied analysis which teases out the intricacies of experiencing GBV. Ahmed reflects on how ‘… feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with a world, a body that is not at ease in a world; a body that fidgets and moves around’ (2017, p. 22) and this unease is derived from repeated unwanted male attention, as the opening quote to this article illustrates. In her book, Ahmed lists numerous incidents of street-based sexual harassment and sexual assault, describing them ‘… not only as an experience of being violated, but as a sensory event’ (p. 23).

So, if feminist researchers have long understood issues of crime and victimization as a sensory experience, why are scholars who call for a sensory criminology yet to recognize this contribution? We contend that this is, at least in part, due to the normalized and ‘unextraordinary’ nature of gender-based violence. For example, in their advocacy for a ‘sensory criminology’, McClanahan and South (2020) argue that Green Criminology is an arena particularly suited to ‘non-visual analysis’ and they provide examples of where it might be applied – the chemical spill in West Virginia’s Elk River in 2014, the wildfires on the Manchester moorlands in 2018, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan in 2018. The events themselves are notable because they produced a shift in the sensory experiences of those who lived nearby – the funny smell from the river, the unusual smoke of the wildfires, the strange taste in the tap water. These case studies demonstrate the value of a sensorial approach as it exposes the non-visual ways in which these crises have an insidious impact on local populations. What these examples have in common is that they are considered to be extraordinary – that is, they are specific events – crises, even – that are significant and noteworthy, but relatively uncommon in their geographical context. In contrast, the defining social feature of GBV is its pervasiveness, with one in three women and girls experiencing at least one form of such violence in their lifetime (WHO, 2021). The ordinariness of GBV is evident when one examines its persistence over time and space: it takes place throughout the life-course, from infancy to old age, and can take place in any social setting, including the home, workplace, on public transport, in leisure settings and online. Its existence, both real and imagined, experienced and feared, forms part of the tapestry of most women’s and girl’s lives. That is, their sensory perceptions of potential victimization are normalized to the extent that, for women and girls, they constitute the ‘atmosphere’ of everyday life. In comparison, the environmental crises mentioned above signify a shift in atmosphere, revealing new and threatening sensorial landscapes. Perhaps then, it is the seeming ‘ordinariness’ of violence against women and girls that limits recognition of its suitability for multi-sensory analysis? Engaging in fieldwork at a time when a global pandemic itself shifted sensorial landscapes and ‘atmospheres’ perhaps provides an appropriate juncture (and worthy ‘event’) through which to explore how sensory criminology can be developed within this field.

Any multi-sensory criminology must include an examination of all the sensory systems, including both their emotional dimensions and the broader ‘atmosphere’ in which the experience plays out. Thus, in this article we draw on data from our collation and analysis of over 140 stories of GBV during the Covid-19 lockdowns to demonstrate the value of a fully multi-sensory criminology for our understanding of GBV. We do this by focusing on women’s storied experiences of street-based sexual harassment and sexual assault during the Covid-19 pandemic and, in so doing, we respond to recent calls for a sensory criminology.

Gender-Based Violence and the Sensory

The concept of GBV draws attention to forms of violence that are harmful to an individual based on their gender, gender identity or gender expression. Critical feminist theory situates GBV as a symptom of the unequal power distribution between men and women (Marganski, 2017; Messerschmidt, 1986) and, driven by hierarchical social constructions of masculinity and femininity, is recognized as occurring systemically and interpersonally. In an interpersonal context, GBV is disproportionately perpetrated by men against women in intimate, familial, community and institutional relationships (Ali & Rogers, 2023; Merry, 2009). As a significant public health and social issue, it manifests in a wide range of behaviours such as femicide, genital mutilation, domestic abuse, socio-economic control, coercive control, sexual violence and rape, stalking and sexual harassment. To us, such forms of GBV are inevitably multi-sensorial in that they are experienced in an embodied and visceral way, mediated and understood through sensory knowledge. To illustrate the applicability of this approach we begin by exploring the five external senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch before turning to the marginalized internal senses, applying each of these to various forms of GBV.

GBV and the External Senses

Sight refers to the visual perception of seeing with the eye and relates to ocular experience. Mulvey’s (1975) pioneering concept of the male gaze, which posits women as ‘objects’ and men as ‘spectators’, offers a framework for many experiences of GBV that include being watched (e.g. ogling, leering, voyeurism) or being forced to watch (e.g. flashing). Some forms of GBV are explicitly visual and fall into the realm of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) which are technologically-mediated (Hayes & Dragiewicz, 2018; Powell & Henry, 2017). Examples include image-making and/or image-sharing (i.e. ‘upskirting’), sending unsolicited sexual imagery (i.e. ‘cyber-flashing’) and disseminating private photographs/videos of another person without their consent (i.e. ‘revenge porn’). Some forms of IBSA may constitute ‘networked harassment’ that is organized and co-ordinated (Marwick & Caplan, 2018). One example of networked harassment is ‘Zoombombing’, which emerged during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and involves the insertion of misogynistic and/or racist content during online conference calls (Lorenz & Alba, 2020). As a form of GBV, ‘Zoombombing’ constitutes a two-pronged form of visual assault where a victim is simultaneously being watched and being forced to watch.

Hearing refers the auditory perception of sound and relates to sonic experience. Sound plays a significant role in our sensory landscapes, producing emotional responses (Lee et al., 2022; Revill, 2016). In relation to GBV, sound can be a powerful weapon when produced by strangers (e.g., cat-calling, wolf-whistling) and by those we are familiar with (e.g., a domestic abuser making accusations and demands). Sound – through voice – can also be used as a means of seeking support for GBV, such as the UK Government’s ‘Ask for Ani’ codeword scheme for victims of domestic abuse,¹ and for challenging misogyny, such as the Mayor of London’s ‘Have a Word’ campaign that encourages men to call out their friends.² The absence of sound can also be used as a weapon of control, such as when perpetrators of domestic abuse use the ‘silent treatment’ on their victims (Rees et al., 2006). The notion of silencing can be applied more broadly in terms of how women’s experiences of GBV are regularly silenced by abusers (Towns & Adams, 2016), family and friends (Mangat, 2022), the media (Oldfield & McDonald, 2021), and the criminal justice system (Birchall & Choudhry, 2022). Such combined practices can result in an institutionalized ‘culture of silence’ around GBV (McAlister et al., 2020).

Smell refers to the olfactory perception of odors and relates to aromatic experience. Sociologists have long argued that smell – both chemical and symbolic – is significant in social interactions (Low, 2006; Synnott, 1991). Simmel (1907/1997) notes that odor provides the most intimate perception of a person and, as such, smell is considered to be fundamental to the construction of the self and the other, particularly in relation to its symbolism regarding smells which connotate ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ (Synnott, 1991). A perpetrator’s reference to a victim’s odor³ can, within popular social discourses, represent infection which, in turn, is associated with a sexual promiscuity that is explicitly gendered. Smell also enhances the retrieval of memories (Henshaw, 2013) and is closely linked to emotion (Vermetten & Bremner, 2003). Consequently, smell can be a ‘trigger’ for traumatic memories known as ‘olfactory flashbacks’ (Hopper, 2020): indeed, the significance of the senses in triggering flashbacks in GBV survivors is recognized by support services (Rape Crisis, 2023).

Taste refers to the gustatory perception of flavour. It belongs to the chemical sensing system (chemoreception) and is closely linked to smell, as taste and odor receptors work together to produce the sensation of flavour. In some cases of domestic abuse, victims are coerced to consume particular foods or drinks that they experience as unpleasant, or are prevented from consuming food and drink that they find pleasurable, as a means of control (Stark, 2013). Drugging victims through food and drink (known as ‘spiking’) is common in some forms of GBV, most notably in ‘drug-facilitated sexual assault’ (DFSA). Spiking drinks with the aim of committing DFSA is particularly effective due to a combination of (i) the tastelessness of the substances used (e.g., Rohypnol) which helps to avoid detection, (ii) the speed at which the substances incapacitate the victim, and (iii) the memory loss that occurs following consumption, which can make it difficult for victims to report an assault (de Souza Costa et al., 2020).

Touch refers to tactile perception through the skin and it relates to somatic experiences such as feeling hot/cold, smooth/rough, pressure, tickle, itch and pain. Touch is implicated in GBV in a number of ways, most obviously through the application of physical pain: punching, pushing, kicking, slapping and penetration are all a means of inflicting physical violence on another. However, touch is also implicated in GBV without inflicting any pain - for example, stroking a victim’s hair or breathing closely on a victim’s neck can operate as a means of sexual harassment. Indeed, the lightness of touch (and lack of pain) can be what makes it difficult for victims to articulate and challenge such harassment. This has been recognized in cases of groping on public transport where crowds mask such behaviour which serves to exacerbate victims’ uncertainty about whether the experience was intentional or not (Lewis et al., 2021). The absence of touch can also be a powerful weapon in some forms of GBV, such as the deliberate withholding of affection to control a partner and/or to communicate demands (Rees et al., 2006). In current understandings of GBV, touch tends to be privileged over the other senses – for example, inflicting physical pain is seen as ‘more serious’ (and dealt with more severely by law enforcement) than non-tactile forms of abuse such as coercive control (Brennan et al., 2021; Stark & Hester, 2019).

GBV and the Internal Senses

Criminological research which aims to focus on the sensory nearly always focuses on the five external senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch (e.g., see Hayward & Presdee, 2010; McClanahan & South, 2020; Young, 2021). In contrast, the internal senses, which have a rich research pedigree within the field of neurobiology (see Ceunen et al., 2016), are usually excluded from such criminological research. The internal sensory system (known as interoception)⁴ perceives stimuli that are internal to one’s body, such as hunger, thirst, tiredness and the urge to urinate or defecate. Its exclusion from sensory criminology is particularly surprising given the important role that the internal senses play in experiences of crime and victimization. This is never more true than in experiences of GBV, where the violation of interoceptive experiences is directly implicated in its many forms– for example, in cases of coercive control where the perpetrator controls the victim’s bodily functions (e.g. by timing bathroom visits) and physiological needs (e.g., through sleep deprivation).

Two specific forms of interoception are of relevance here. First, ‘equilibrioception’ refers to the perception of our bodies in relation to gravity, movement and balance (an example of this is the sensation of moving on a train despite sitting still). A commonly used phrase that encapsulates the experience of living with domestic abuse is that it feels like “walking on eggshells’’ (e.g., Humphreys et al., 2019; Langford, 1994; Radford & Hester, 2006). This metaphorical phrase highlights the inter-related experiences of movement through space (walking) with self on unstable terrain (on eggshells). The phrase offers a profound evocation of equilibrioception as it relates to GBV. A second internal sense is ‘proprioception’, which refers to the awareness of where our body is in relation to itself (an example of this is, when’s one’s legs are crossed, having the sensory knowledge of what is required to un-cross them without having to look). Proprioception involves processing a range of sensations, including the perceptions of joint position and movement, effort, and muscle force, which allow us to assess limb movement, position, heaviness, stiffness, and viscosity. Some culturally-harmful practices that constitute GBV, such as foot-binding, distort our proprioception (Gu et al., 2015), and proprioception is also implicated in our sense of body-image (Jaconis et al., 2020).

The Methodological Context: The ‘Pandemic Atmosphere’ and GBV

The coronavirus known as Covid-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 and, by March 2020, a pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020). One significant consequence of the pandemic was a series of ‘lockdown laws’ that were introduced by governments around the world to restrict movement to limit transmission. For example, during the first national lockdown in England (March to June 2020), people were ordered to ‘stay at home’ and only permitted to leave for essential purposes (e.g., buying food or medical reasons) or to exercise for 1 hr, once a day. Schools, universities and ‘non-essential’ high street businesses were closed and, unless categorized as a ‘key worker’, people were ordered to either work from home or were placed on furlough. From May 2020 onwards, England’s lockdown laws slowly relaxed: people were permitted to leave home for outdoor recreation (in groups of up to six people). The ‘two-metre rule’, whereby people outside of their own household should not come within two metres of each other, was advised by the UK government, as was the wearing of face coverings. From summer 2020, throughout 2021 and into 2022, a range of lockdown laws and guidelines were imposed and then loosened, sometimes nationally and sometimes locally, as they fractured and reconfigured our personal, social and professional lives, altering our everyday socio-spatial interactions. These restrictions drastically reconstructed our ‘sensescapes’ (Herrity et al., 2021) - that is, the interaction between physical space and (their role in) sensory experiences.

Public discourses around the Covid-19 pandemic became inextricably linked with the sensory. For example, during the first UK national lockdown, the British Geological Survey (2020) reported that ‘cultural noise’ (i.e., human-induced vibrations) reduced by a quarter as the streets, roads and skies became deserted. Symptoms of the coronavirus drew attention to our senses as we lost our sense of taste and smell, while the wearing of face-coverings reduced the ability to smell and taste. It also hindered our ability to hear others clearly or to read the emotions of others, inhibiting social interaction (Carbon, 2020). These changes in our sensory landscapes produced a specific pandemic ‘atmosphere’. Atmospheres can be defined as a collectively experienced ambience of a space or place that represent a ‘shared encounter which creates subjective states, feelings and emotions’ (Anderson, 2009, p. 78). Everyday routines, social interactions and the ‘rhythms’ of a place all constitute its ‘atmosphere’ (Lewis et al., 2021; Preece et al., 2023) and the pandemic produced a specifically unique atmosphere. At the same time, the pandemic reconfigured our emotional landscapes, as anxiety, stress and fear were widely reported to have increased in response to pandemic-related concerns about health, relationships, education, and finances (Xiang et al., 2020).

One particularly worrying aspect of the pandemic was the increase in reported incidents of GBV around the world (UN Women, 2020). Whilst the ‘twin pandemics’ of GBV and Covid-19 transcended social, economic and geographic borders, they are both rooted in structural inequalities which makes some populations particularly at risk. GBV during the pandemic was experienced particularly acutely by marginalized women, such as domestic workers, older women, disabled women and Black and ethnically minoritized women (Simonovic, 2020). Theories have been put forward to explain the increase of GBV during the Covid-19 pandemic (see Mittal & Singh, 2020). For example, new rules forced people to spend time together, often in small homes with restricted access to outside, work and leisure spaces, mitigating usual coping strategies (Preece et al., 2021). The increased psychological and financial stress that accompanied the pandemic may, in turn, have resulted in an increase in behaviours (such as alcohol use) which represent risk factors for GBV perpetration. Other theories highlight the depletion of existing support networks as a result of lockdown, resulting in reduced opportunities to identify cases of GBV and to implement prevention strategies. Finally, there were reports about how the lockdown restrictions were weaponized by perpetrators of GBV – for example, enabling closer monitoring of a victim’s movements and furthering control of their social interactions (Smyth et al., 2021)

It is worth noting here that the overriding aim of this article is not to offer an exhaustive analysis of the alterations, frequency or severity of GBV caused by the pandemic, as this has been done elsewhere (for example, Dlamini, 2021; Murray et al., 2022; Saleem et al., 2021). Instead, our analysis focuses on using the context of the pandemic and the associated shift in ‘atmosphere’ to illustrate the applicability of a multi-sensorial lens to experiences of GBV and to illustrate the insights that can be produced by such an approach.

Methods: A Multi-Sensorial Approach to GBV

Sensory criminologists have called for researchers to commit to ‘creative ways of thinking about crime, harm, control and power’ (McClanahan & South, 2020, p. 6; see also Hayward & Presdee, 2010; Herrity et al., 2021). This is to enable criminologists to capture the sensorial aspects of crime and victimization which more traditional research methods (e.g., surveys, interviews) may not be able access. We responded to this call by drawing on feminist practices of storytelling to explore the multi-sensorial experience of GBV. This article draws on data from a wider study that used a range of creative storytelling methods to explore experiences of GBV in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic by using three methods: primary data collection from (1) creative workshops involving participants and (2) auto-ethnographic workshops involving the research team, and (3) secondary data collection from existing online sources.

First, we hosted a series of six online workshops which enabled participants to produce stories through writing, drawing, sewing and talking about their experiences of GBV during lockdown. Participants were recruited through advertisements about the workshops through a range of social media sites and, while open to all, those who attended all identified as women. Run by professional facilitators, the workshops focused on writing, comic-book production, collage-making, storytelling walks, stich and text, and map-making. A counsellor experienced in GBV was made available to participants during and after the workshops. Second, the project team, consisting of six women, engaged in a series of online auto-ethnographic workshops to produce our own writings about our experiences of GBV during the pandemic. Third, we collected existing first-person accounts about experiences of GBV during the pandemic from a wide range of UK-based open-access online blogs and forums. After our first collation of data, we focused on identifying additional stories from sources that were predominantly used by those who were under-represented in the initial data sweep, including LGBTQ + people, Black and ethnically minoritized people, and people with disabilities.

Overall, these three data production methods yielded a corpus of over 140 stories. For this article, we have focused specifically on storied experiences of street-based sexual harassment and sexual assault during the Covid-19 pandemic, which were the most common forms of GBV described in the stories collected. Street-based sexual harassment is understood to be one of the most ‘routine’ forms of GBV (Kelly, 1987; Vera-Gray, 2016) and it includes behaviours such as sexualized and offensive comments, catcalling, repeated advances, whistling, beeping, exposure/flashing, leering, stalking, and up-skirting. Sexual assault in public spaces involves non-consensual bodily contact and includes behaviours such as groping, frotteuring, and other forms of unwanted physical contact. While the ’pandemic atmosphere’ impacted on all forms of GBV, for this article we are selecting these two specific forms of GBV to allow a more succinct and in-depth analysis of how these relatively ‘normalised’ and ‘everyday’ experiences shifted sensorially during the pandemic. This focus allows us to demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of a multi-sensory criminology of GBV.

We subjected the text-based stories to thematic analysis which involved each team member reading through the stories several times before the team discussed the coding framework and developed the potential categories and themes by which to organise the data. Then, using NVivo software, the data was subject to further analysis whereby initial codes were refined. Through an iterative process, the team came together to discuss and refine the coding framework further. During analysis, key themes were identified whilst also attending to the intersectional aspects of the stories, particularly in terms of gender, sexuality, age/generation, social class, dis/ability and ethnicity (where these were referred to in the stories). The project gained ethical approval by the university ethics committee prior to the fieldwork starting. All names in this article have been pseudonymised.

Findings: A Multi-Sensorial Approach to Street-Based Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault

In this section, we adopt a multi-sensorial approach to map out the ‘sensory totality’ of street-based sexual harassment and sexual assault. We do this by examining how both the external senses and the internal senses are implicated in the storied experiences while also attending to the emotional dimension of the encounter and to the broader ‘pandemic atmosphere’ in which it took place. We start by exploring Harper’s story, which concerns an experience of sexual assault:

This evening I hit my lockdown low. Walking along the main road at 5.45 p.m., just about to start a run, I realized there was someone too close to me. As the man got closer he broke into a run and groped me – grabbing my bum. I live alone. I’ve not had any physical contact with another person for almost two months. I was stunned. I stopped in my tracks, staring incredulously ahead of me as he ran off. And then the anger erupted and I shouted loudly at him so it was clear for the people on the other side of the road what he had done. His response was to look over his shoulder and give me the finger.

There are a number of insights that can be gleaned from Harper’s story. First, the multi-sensorial nature of Harper’s encounter is explicit: it is at once visual, sonic, and tactile, and imbued with emotion, predominantly shock and anger. Second, the touch that Harper sensed was intensified by the ‘pandemic atmosphere’ in which it took place. It has been noted elsewhere that a key sensory component of the pandemic was the months that people endured without being able to embrace loved ones, producing an experience conceptualized as ‘touch hunger’ (Durkin et al., 2021). Thus, the general absence of touch made the assault on her all the more intrusive. Third, Harper’s voice, fuelled by anger, contributed an important component to her story, not only in terms of its role in the sequence of events, but also in terms of how sound can constitute an act of resistance against GBV. The sensory context of resistance to GBV is a point to which we return. Fourth, the assault takes place entirely in motion: Harper is running, as is her assailant – behind her, alongside her, and finally ahead of her: the encounter of GBV took place entirely through her movement in space. Thus, alongside her external sensory system, Harper was simultaneously responding to her internal sensory system. A second example of this is Harper’s experience of a sense of danger in the moments before the attack – an internal ‘gut feeling’ produced in response to her sense that spatial boundaries were being invaded as she realized that someone was ‘too close’. While such boundaries were previously unspoken, the ‘pandemic atmosphere’ meant that these were now explicitly articulated through government guidance, and this shift in atmosphere shaped her storied experience of the encounter.

Georgia’s story concerns an experience on the threshold of her private domestic space and the street:

I was on the phone, deep in conversation, and had just arrived at my front door. As I got out the keys a man was walking fast behind me and aggressively shouting ‘Hello?! Hello?! Hello???!!’ Like I owed him the time of day. I stumbled on my words, as he came right into my space (we are still in a pandemic) and managed to squeeze in the door before he could get in behind me. He gave me a horrible look and kept shouting ‘Hello??! Hello?!! Hello??!’ I wish I could just have a phone conversation and get into my own property without feeling intimidated for not speaking to some random man.

Georgia’s story also highlights the multi-sensorial nature of GBV, as the external senses of sight, sound and touch were all implicated in the encounter, as was her internal proprioceptive system as she sensed her body ‘squeeze’ through her door. Both the voice and body of her perpetrator imposed themselves in a way that was ‘out of place’ not only because of the ‘pandemic atmosphere’ that was configured around social distancing rules, but also because she was standing at the threshold of her domestic private realm. Furthermore, not only was sound used to scare her, sound was demanded of her: feeling ‘intimidated for not speaking’, control over her own silence was wrestled from her. Street-based sexual harassment is often understood as ‘men’s stranger intrusions’ (Vera-Gray, 2016) which curtail women’s feelings of safety in public spaces. In the already restrictive ‘pandemic atmosphere’, experiences of street-based sexual harassment further complicate access to public spaces and intensify feelings of invasion.

The Role of Emotion in GBV

Eliana’s story illustrates another multi-sensorial encounter of GBV:

I’d been happily running along again until I hear a car beeping, I turn around to see no-one else around so I wasn’t sure what the car was beeping at. Then as they got closer, I could see the creepy look on his face as he went past me at a slight slower pace. I felt disgusted again and decided tomorrow I will run in loose clothing just to see if it makes a difference … I don’t know how to feel about my experience and I don’t understand why it was so much worse when something like a worldwide pandemic is happening.

Eliana’s story illustrates how her external senses are stimulated sonically (alerting her to something unusual) and then visually (by her perpetrator’s ‘creepy’ look). Her internal senses are stimulated simultaneously: she is running ‘happily’, enjoying the positive feedback from her proprioceptive system, while her assailant moves in a car, slowing to her pace as it reaches her, enabling her equilibrioception to sense the danger and confirm what her external senses are telling her. However, there is another distinct yet inter-related element to Eliana’s story: the emotional experience. The internal senses play an important role in the experience of emotion, which we conceptualize as the subjective interpretation (e.g., fear) of internal bodily symptoms (e.g. heart racing) (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). Sensory experiences cannot be understood without attending to emotion: how we sense the world shapes how we feel about it. Thus, Eliana’s story is imbued with a sequence of emotions which are based on information from her external and her internal senses: initial happiness, followed by uncertainty, then disgust, and concluding in resolve to avoid similar experiences in the future. Her emotional processing of the encounter continues into the present, evidenced by her confusion in the final sentence as she tries to comprehend the experience, which itself was intensified by the ‘atmosphere’ of the pandemic. Eliana’s rhetorical question is interesting: why is it so much worse during a worldwide pandemic? There are a number of possible reasons as to why experiences of GBV are amplified during a pandemic. Certainly, in the context of lockdown restrictions related to social-distancing (i.e. the ‘two-metre rule’), the invasion of one’s personal space may feel more intrusive because perpetrators are not only crossing a social boundary but also a legal boundary. They are also crossing a health boundary, given the risk of virus transmission in such behaviours. Indeed, during this period, spontaneous social encounters were significantly reduced as many public spaces became sources of health-related anxiety. As such, an incident of street-based sexual harassment is experienced in the emotional context of already fragile and uneasy sensibilities.

It is important to note that the emotions experienced during an encounter of GBV do not only relate to the here-and-now, but may be the product of past trauma. This is evident in Madison’s story below:

I’m on lockdown but we’re allowed to go for one run or walk a day. It was 8 in the morning and I was running alongside a fairly busy road (for my town) and two men in a van honked at me. When I jumped (I’ve experienced several traumas in the last year and loud noises and fast unexpected movements make me jump) I saw the one in the passenger seat staring at me and laughing at me. Running has been my way of recovering and regaining control after and in the midst of what had happened and I just wanted to curl up on the street and cry (one of my old, unhealthy coping tactics) but I kept running home. When I told my mum she said I shouldn’t have worn the top I had to go running if I didn’t want that sort of thing to happen.

The multi-sensory nature of Madison’s experience is clear: visual (two men in a van) and the auditory (the van honked) worked together to produce a shift in Madison’s internal sensory system which made her startle. Madison’s story also highlights how her emotional response is not just a response to stimuli operating in the present but is also a response to what happened to her in the past. As discussed above, the retrieval of memories is closely linked to emotion and therefore traumatic memories can be ‘triggered’ by sensory cues taking in the present.⁵ The role of trauma, then, is a further element to understanding GBV in terms of how the sensory experience is remembered and embodied.⁶ As Madison’s story illustrates, specific sensorial meanings can shift, warping into triggers that uproot past events. She also articulates how exteroceptive sensory input impacts on her interoceptive experience, not just momentarily, but affecting how she navigates the world. These multi-sensorial insights have the potential to offer nuanced understandings of trauma and the everyday impact of ‘everyday’ GBV.

Resistance to GBV and the Role of the Sensory

So far, we have established that experiences of GBV are multi-sensorial and involve the interaction of external/internal senses and emotions within the broader ‘atmosphere’. However, there were also many examples in our data where the senses were implicated in resistance to GBV. For example, Evelyn describes an experience of street-based sexual assault:

During lockdown, I was returning home from a late shift at work when I was physically attacked by a stranger. I heard somebody shouting out of view from around the corner. A man appeared - he seemed high and was swigging from a can of cider. He clocked me standing on the pavement with my bike and lurched towards my face. Before I could think of what to do, the words ‘STAY AWAY FROM ME’ had already left my mouth, reverberating around the empty street. He laughed and moved towards me again. He admitted defeat and walked on. But as I went to get back onto my bike, he was behind me. He hit me hard on the bum and said ‘stupid bitch’ in my face before walking away. When I got home I immediately called the police. I was disappointed when they refused to do a search of the area or come and visit me at home to take a statement. I was raped in 2015 and had experience with reporting assault to the police. But I felt that my case wasn’t taken seriously this time, despite the effect it had had on me.

Evelyn’s encounter was clearly multi-sensorial, and the role of emotion is apparent – both the emotion from the encounter itself, and the emotion from a previous experience of GBV which shaped the present. Like Harper’s story above, Evelyn’s story also speaks of multi-sensorial acts of resistance which are primarily vocal. Furthermore, the role of the ‘pandemic atmosphere’ is evident in Evelyn’s resistance – the empty street around which her words reverberated made it all the more powerful.

Verbal resistance is not an uncommon strategy for managing GBV and has been theorized in the GBV literature as an act of self-defense (Fleetwood, 2019; Gardner, 1995). However, resistance to GBV can take many forms, and it may operate at a more subtle level, as revealed in Talia’s story:

Even during Covid-19 lockdown, harassment does not stop. I was out for a run, taking my daily exercise, when a man started clapping as I ran. With headphones in it was easy to ignore him until I stopped to check my route briefly and he came over to PAT ME ON THE BACK. As in he actually TOUCHED me in the middle of a GLOBAL PANDEMIC! This would have been bad enough under normal circumstances but I was so angry that he so clearly flouted social distancing guidelines putting me and my family at risk. I live with an elderly and immunocompromised family member. To top it all off he was wearing a mask meaning he clearly knows there is a risk.

Again, Talia’s experience highlights the multi-sensorial nature of GBV, with sight, sound and touch all implicated in the encounter. Her internal senses were also implicated in her initial movement (‘out for a run’) followed by her immobilization as a response (‘I stopped’). However, Talia’s story also demonstrates how the senses are used to resist GBV. Her headphones – symbolic of sound – were used to both block out those vocal intrusions that constitute street-based sexual harassment, and to act as a deterrence against it. Talia’s story resonates with criminological scholarship that has explored the impact of listening to music through headphones in urban space (e.g., Thibaud, 2003) and, in particular, its provision of a personal shield to create ‘mobile sanctuaries and autonomy within intrusive sound ecologies’ (Atkinson, 2007). Whilst the ‘pandemic atmosphere’ involved the quietening of urban acoustic landscapes, stories such as Talia’s demonstrate how vocal intrusions punctuate these muted soundscapes, and how victims use sound to restructure and reclaim space.

Discussion

In this article, we have highlighted the importance of addressing sensory totality in any kind of understanding of sensory experience, criminological or otherwise. That is, scholars must attend to both the external and the internal senses, the latter of which are often ignored – even in studies that advocate for a sensory criminology. Scholars must also attend to both the emotional experience and the broader ‘atmosphere’ in which it plays out. As our analysis shows, the ‘pandemic atmosphere’ caused street-based sexual harassment and assault to be experienced in ways which often intensified women’s sensory experience of victimization, providing a fruitful opportunity to demonstrate the value of a multi-sensory criminology of GBV. As such, this article makes important theoretical and methodological contributions to criminology and has important applications for criminal justice practice.

Theoretical and Methodological Contributions

Our focus on the problem of GBV has uncovered some important insights about ‘sensory criminology’. First, it has been argued that the visual sensory modality is privileged while tactility and touch, along with other non-visual sensory modalities, ‘remain relatively unexamined as objects of theoretical criminological inquiry’ (McClanahan & South, 2020, p. 12). However, one of the consistent criticisms of traditional approaches to GBV, whether in terms of criminal justice processes or in terms of research priorities, is its focus on physical harm – harms experienced primarily through touch – at the expense of other forms of harm. In contrast, forms of GBV which are experienced primarily through the visual modality are most frequently minimized and dismissed. Non-tactile forms of harm, such cat-calling and psychological abuse, are similarly under-prioritized (this was evident in Evelyn’s story of sexual assault and the police response to it, above). By explicitly drawing out the multi-sensory nature of GBV, we challenge the claim that the visual is always privileged in mainstream criminology and in criminal justice practice.

Second, criminologists recognize that sound can constitute a form of harm, violence and control, and they highlight examples of its use as punishment and torture within penal systems (Herrity et al., 2021; McClanahan & South, 2020). However, our analysis has highlighted how sound plays an important role within the dynamics of street-based sexual harassment and assault. We also illustrated how women use sound to resist street harassment, and how broader ‘atmospheres’ also contribute to resistance.⁷ No doubt other senses are also used in acts of defiance, and it is important to recognize these subtle yet important strategies in any discussion of GBV to avoid the erasure of women’s resistance in such encounters (Hollander & Rodgers, 2014).

Third, while criminologists often focus on the five external senses, our findings highlight the importance of examining internal sensory systems which contribute to the sensory totality of women’s experiences. In particular, the importance of the ‘sense of danger’ experienced by women in readiness to impending violent encounters. While ‘gut feelings’ have been reported anecdotally as central to experiences of GBV, they have been largely overlooked in the research literature, other than in terms of how professionals assess risk of GBV in others (e.g., Baird et al., 2020; Finnbogodottir et al., 2020). Even then, ‘gut feelings’ are referred to fleetingly without consideration of how sensory experiences are implicated in their mobilization. However, there were many examples in our data of how the internal sensory system was mobilized to produce a ‘gut feeling’ in the stories we collated – indeed, they often formed the central spine of those stories.

In terms of methodological contributions, it became evident during our analysis that the ‘sensory’ is a common way of knowing and articulating GBV for those who experience it. It is therefore important to develop research methods which can embrace this epistemology, rather than marginalize it as more traditional social science methods might do. Much of the research that focuses on the sensory takes ‘documentary criminology’ and ‘walking ethnography’ as its methodological base (McClanahan & South, 2020). In contrast, our storytelling approach demonstrates the value of drawing on multiple forms of textual data to enable an analysis that captures the ‘sensory totality’.

Practice Contributions

Our study also makes important contributions to criminal justice practice. As we have highlighted, certain experiences of GBV, particularly those involving touch, are privileged in the criminal justice system, while others are marginalized. As non-physical violence in the form of coercive control is criminalized around the world, police and other practitioners are grappling with the challenge of evidencing non-contact abusive behavior, arguing that this potentially places higher reliance on victim testimony (Brennan et al., 2021). This being so, we suggest that a shift towards valuing victims’ multi-sensorial experiences can help explain the invisible ‘atmospheres’ that GBV creates and operates within. It can also add weight to victim testimonies and extend practitioner understandings of these experiences.

‘Self-told’ stories (rather than those produced through police interviews and research interviews, which often follow a prescribed format) allow raw, sensory knowledges and atmospheres to be articulated – in other words, there is space within the method for sensory totality. These stories build on and contribute to the plethora of victim voices that have been gathered and amplified by grassroots feminist activists to reveal the complex realities of experiencing GBV and to challenge institutionalized narratives.⁸ In terms of application, we argue that foregrounding free-form, multi-sensorial stories have the potential to empower victims, better inform criminal justice practitioners, and contribute to the effectiveness of awareness-raising and prevention strategies. For practitioners and public alike, there is an urgency in acknowledging the multi-sensory, particularly the role that the often-neglected internal senses play in victim responses. For example, understanding how behavioral responses such as ‘freezing’ are the result of interacting exteroceptive and interoceptive experiences can help to overcome misconceptions about ‘appropriate’ or ‘natural’ responses to GBV victimization, and challenge victim-blaming responses, such as “Why didn’t she fight back?”

Recommendations for Future Research

Our analysis only focused on street-based sexual harassment and assault, and future research should examine the sensory totality of other forms of GBV, such as domestic abuse, institutional/state violence against women, and so-called honor-based crimes and culturally-harmful practices. As we outlined in the introduction, the sensory analysis of GBV has long been ignored because of the very ordinariness of GBV, and it is an ongoing challenge for feminist criminologists to make visible the taken-for-granted abuses of power that women experience every day. A multi-sensorial approach can help us to do that. Part of this approach includes an analysis of ‘atmosphere’, and it would also be useful to examine how different ‘atmospheres’ – such as the prison, the university, the shopping mall – shape such everyday experiences. Ultimately, it is important that any analysis goes beyond description and starts to explain why experiences of GBV take the particular forms they do at any one moment in history.

Our findings indicate that the sensory plays an important role in women’s resistance to GBV. It is inevitable that the sensory also plays an important role in women’s resistance to other forms of power outside of GBV, such as navigating ‘man-made’ public spaces (Kern, 2020; Matrix, 2022), forced mobilities, exploitative workplaces and, of course, those environmental crises highlighted by McClanahan and South (2020). Relatedly, there is likely to be value in exploring the ways in which the sensory plays a role in resistance to abuses of power against other marginalized communities, such as LGBTQ + people, Black and ethnically minoritized people, and people with disabilities and/or who are neurodivergent (and who, in particular, may sense the world in different ways to the neurotypical majority).

While beyond the scope of this article, we also think there is scope in exploring the role of metaphor within sensory criminology and, in particular, in experiences of GBV. When danger is sensed, internal physiological responses such as tonic immobility (i.e. muscle rigidity) and collapsed immobility (i.e. reduced blood pressure and heart rate) may mediate both immediate and delayed sensory experiences (Hopper, 2020). However, it can be difficult for victims to translate these internal sensory experiences into the words that are required by police officers or support workers, for example. As a result, metaphor can be an important tool to help victims to describe experiences of GBV that are otherwise inarticulable (Pink, 2003). That is, metaphor translates the internal sensory experience into something that is externally perceived, tangible, and relatable. This might explain why much of the vocabulary around GBV is metaphorical: many forms of GBV, such as ‘catcall’, ‘spiking’, ‘flashing’, ‘Zoombombing’, rely on metaphor, as does the emblematic experience of ‘walking on eggshells’ discussed above. In our data, many stories drew on metaphor to articulate the internally-mediated sensory experiences of GBV, and further exploration of this would be fruitful.

Finally, we have also demonstrated the applicability of a sensorial lens to the ordinary and everyday, as well as the abnormal and extraordinary. In the introduction we drew on McClanahan and South’s (2020) application of a sensorial approach to understand the impact of environmental events or crises. We contend that sensory criminology can be equally useful in understanding and deconstructing the ontological and epistemological foundations of ‘normal’ life and everyday experience. This is applicable both in exploring GBV and other, broader criminological issues – for example, what is the sensorial experience of an absence of fear, risk and harm? Following these lines of inquiry would lay the foundations for a deeper understanding of how experiences of crime, harm and violence in their multitudinous forms disrupt and disturb everyday life.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/VO13122/1).

ORCID iD

Amanda Holt

Notes

Author Biographies

Dr. Amanda Holt is a Reader in Criminology at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. Her research broadly focuses on the problem of domestic and family violence, and she has also published widely on qualitative methodologies.

Dr. Sian Lewis is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her research broadly focuses on the problem of sexual harassment in public spaces, and violence against women and girls.

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