The discursive framing of street harassment at Algerian universities

Abstract

In public spaces, women face all kinds of distribution in form of vulgar words and sarcastic comments which is called street harassment.This dissertation aims to shed light on the previous term, where my objective is to show the language used by the harasser and how such a problem like street harassment makes language critical and used in ugly way byshowing how sexist language is. A semi-structured interview and participant observation were well prepared for this purpose, where I reviewed fourty persons from two different states: Tiaret and Oran,in order to collect as many expressions of harassment as possible. Through a critical analysis of two major CDA frameworks: Van Leewen’s representation of social actors and Van Dijk’s theory of ideology, the language of the harasser have been analyzed in order to understand the hidden ideologies behind the discourse of the harasser. The interview’s results from 40 participants indicated that the harasser uses two different discourses: first; violent discourse to prove his dominance in the Algerian society, second; gentle discourse in order to attract the Algerian university student, whereas the observation’s result clearly showed that both veiled and non-veiled students have been harassed .Theimplication of the results, limitations of the study, and future direction were discussed.