Gendered Violence and Vulnerability in the Night Time Economy.

• In Event: Deviant Leisure, Resistance and Harm

Abstract

In the UK we are currently seeing small signs of progressive change around a number of areas of sexual assault, rape and harassment, exemplified by (among other examples) the recent release of the CPS and police action plan on rape (CPS, 2014), online harassment (protection of freedoms act, 2012), as well as an apparent increase in reporting of rape and sexual assault. However, few comparable advances or increases in protection appear to have been afforded women who experience victimisation within the night time economy. Here, sexual aggression is pervasive, and alcohol consumption within the NTE is linked to a high proportion of reported cases of rape and sexual assault. While the underrepresentation of these cases in official statistics is well documented, there is a much larger dark figure surrounding the ubiquity of ‘lower level’ assaults and sexual aggression, that for most women is viewed as a ‘regrettable but unavoidable’ part of a night out, or as an occupational hazard of working in the NTE. This paper contends that these incidents, common to the point of banality, are rooted in the structural organization of the marketised night time economy. This position moves beyond that of the responsibilisation thesis favoured by successive British governments, and is oppositional to the academic and mainstream framing of urban night spaces as creative and liberating playscapes. Rather, the violence exhibited within the NTE is written into the cultural code of these circuits of consumption, woven into the fabric of a night out and embedded as what Slavoj Žižek would refer to as systemic and symbolic violence.

Author

• Oliver Smith, Plymouth University, UK