Perceptions of Victims of Street Harassment: Effects of Nationality and Hair Color in Vietnam
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Perceptions of Victims of Street Harassment: Effects of Nationality and Hair Color in Vietnam Kimberly Fairchild1 · Hong Nguyen1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Very little research has investigated how a woman’s appearance affects the perceptions and judgments of her as a victim of harassment. This study focuses on how Vietnamese participants evaluate victims of street harassment based on nationality (Vietnamese vs. American) and hair color (dark/brown vs. light/blonde). After randomly viewing a blonde or dark-haired Vietnamese or White American target and reading her story of street harassment, participants rated her perceived threat, negative emotions, benign coping, self-blame, self-esteem, and frequency of street harassment. The results align with the hypotheses that blondes will be judged to experience less threat, negative emotions, and self-blame, but to experience more benign coping, self-esteem, and frequency of street harassment. This main effect for hair color, however, was qualified by significant interactions of these dependent measures suggesting that the blonde Vietnamese target was especially likely to not experience street harassment as negative. This research suggests that hair color, much like clothing and makeup, is used to judge women’s experiences of street harassment. Keywords Street harassment · Vietnam · #MeToo · Stranger harassment · Hair color
Introduction With the advent of #MeToo, women around the globe have raised their hands and tweeted #MeToo to share their experiences with gender-based violence ranging from harassment to assault. Understanding encounters with gender-based violence in different cultures around the world can help to illuminate the similarities and differences in women’s experiences. Street harassment is one type of gender-based violence, and defined by Hutson and Krueger (2019) as “an intrusion, often by a person * Kimberly Fairchild [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Manhattan College, 4513 Manhattan College Parkway, Riverdale, NY 10471, USA
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unknown to the target, which may take a variety of forms, ranging from remarks on physical appearance to sexual touch to brutal physical assaults” (p. 770). Street harassment has been studied in a variety of countries around the world, but no studies have been conducted in Asian countries. Research on street harassment has been conducted in many different countries including the United States (e.g. Fairchild and Rudman 2008; Kearl 2014; Davidson et al. 2015, 2016; Saunders et al. 2017), the United Kingdom (e.g. Betts et al. 2019), Australia (e.g. Johnson and Bennet 2015; Bastomski and Smith 2017; Fileborn 2018), Sweden (Mellgren et al. 2017), Spain (Berenguer et al. 2016; Moya-Garófano et al. 2018), Morocco (Berenguer et al. 2016; Chafai 2017), Mexico (Campos et al. 2017), Peru (Alcalde 2018), Egypt (Henry 2017), and India (Madan and Nalla 2016; Borker 2017; Adur and Jha 2018). These studies find
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