Problems of Harassment in the Russian Public Sphere: Actors and Discourses

The thesis is devoted to the study of representations of harassment as a sociocultural phenomenon in the Russian public sphere. The discussion about harassment was actualized in the public field of Russia in October 2017, when it became known that dozens of actresses accused of sexual harassment of the famous Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. After this precedent, the stories of women faced with harassment began to be published more and more often in the Russian public sphere, and social journalists, bloggers and human rights activists began to problematize this phenomenon, to declare the need to set a law on harassment. Despite the fact that harassment was discussed extensively in the media, and thousands of women in the framework of flash mobs on social networks talked about sexual harassment they suffered not only by bosses or strangers, but also by relatives, friends and teachers, the state and the scientific community did not pay problem of due attention. Sociological studies devoted to harassment in Russia are represented in small numbers and, as a rule, analyze the problem of harassment in the workplace, without trying to comprehend the problem comprehensively. The draft law on sexual harassment, submitted to the State Duma in 2014, was rejected the same year, and since then the Government has not addressed this topic. At the moment, the Russian legislative system lacks a mechanism to protect women from harassment, despite the fact that the existence of a social demand is obvious. The study attempts to analyze this paradox. For this, it is necessary to get an idea of how harassment is discussed in the Russian public sphere, what discourses of the problem exist, which actors and for what purposes produce these discourses. At the first stage of the study, with the help of expert interviews with journalists publishing materials about the harassment, an idea was obtained of the socio-cultural conditions that could influence the formation of discourses and representations of the problem. At the second stage, through an online content analysis of harassment articles with the highest attendance rating on Google, conclusions are drawn about the nature and characteristics of existing discourses of the problem, designated as sexist (mainstream discourse) and human rights (counter-discourse). At the third stage, using biographical interviews with journalists, the motivation of actors problematizing harassment in the Russian public sphere is described. In addition, the work presents and analyzes the statistics of Russian sociological agencies regarding the attitude of citizens to harassment, and also examines harassment cases that have attracted wide public attention over the past three years. Thus, an attempt is made to broadly comprehend the problems of harassment in the Russian public sphere in order to create a “starting point” for further research on the problem in Russia.