‘We Call it Getting Your Eye In’: Policing Sexual Harassment on the London Underground Through the Lens of Haraway’s Situated Knowledges and Cyborgs

Abstract

This article explores police perspectives of sexual harassment on the London Underground. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with the British Transport Police this article demonstrates how the police a) use their ‘situated knowledges’ to make sense of the dynamics of the London Underground and seek out offenders within the network, often without a report of harassment; and b) engage with technologies in order to (re)construct incidents of sexual harassment so that they can be investigated. The article argues that the BTP occupy a ‘soft cyborg ontology’, and claims the implications this has on epistemologies and methods of policing as significant. As well as permitting new insights into the procedures of policing sexual harassment on public transport, it contributes a critical perspective to the role of technology in police culture, practice and methods.