Victim blaming and resistance to victim’s resistance within discourses of sexual harassment as revealed through Algerian teenage girls’ personal experiences

Abstract EN

Central to this study are oral personal narratives, it examines teenage girls’ experiences of public sexual harassment in the North West of Algeria.

Although their experiences varied, their responses revealed that girls’ resistance to sexual harassment and their self-defense in particular often encounter significant resistance from others.

Drawing on resources from CDA and feminist approaches that take the constitutive nature of discourse as its focus, the analysis of every case is representative of three major types of resistance presented by Jocelyn A.

Hollander (2009).

Teenage girls’ sense of the self, developing their own embodied agency and being defenders of themselves is not possible, aggressive, uncceptable solution to sexual harassment and risks blaming the victim.

Evidently, as having fixed occupied identities of sacrificial daughters and pretty sisters who are doing honourable and correct things, teenage girls define themselves in relation to their families and show no sign of agency because the patriarchal culture of honour has strongly legitimizes males’ sexual harassment against them and limit their abilities to resist it.