Taking Back the Night: Preventing Unwanted Sexual Attention

Abstract

What can we now say about what unwanted sexual attention is, and how might we begin to take steps to prevent it? This book presents important implications for current conceptual and theoretical understandings of sexual violence. Such understandings require a degree of fluidity or flexibility, and the author advocates for the use of assemblage as a productive conceptual tool in this regard. Theoretically, these findings present a clear need for our frameworks of understanding of sexual violence to account also for intersections of identity, space, and place. Current, largely heteronormative theories of sexual violence are insufficient to account for the complexity and diversity of young people’s experiences. The chapter concludes by considering what can be done to work towards preventing unwanted sexual attention in pubs and clubs.