Walking the Streets Without Fear: Investigating a Specific Offence of Public Sexual Harassment

The events of 2021 sparked a socio-political awakening among our population. Public protests and social media campaigns intensified against the backdrop of recurring high-profile cases of violence against women such as the murders of Sarah Everard, Ashling Murphy and Sabina Nessa. As awareness, and fear, of sexual harassment in public places rises among women and girls in the United Kingdom, it must be investigated whether the law is being fully utilised to protect the female population. This article seeks to understand how we can employ the criminal law to respond to this problem. Through investigating what public sexual harassment is, why it possesses characteristics of criminality and how it engages with existing legal framework. This article argues that the English and Welsh criminal law systems should introduce a specific offence that outlaws public sexual harassment (PSH). At the time of writing, women can, legally, be subjected to public displays of unwanted sexual attention. Where behaviours can be shoehorned under an existing offence, complexities in the framework mean the law struggles to ever be enforced effectively. As such, this discourse will explore the opportunities that a specific office of public sexual harassment would create to address the shortcomings of current law and how such an offence could operate to provide the legal protection desired by so many in our society. It argues that by doing so, favourable social responses can be generated which will deter engagement with the conduct and decrease its prevalence by changing social perceptions of the act itself.