Analyzing sentiments from street harassment stories

Street harassment is a pervasive problem that typically targets women and LGBTQ community. There are no effective ways to deal with the harassers as the acts of harassment happen randomly and are difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute. Hollaback! is an international movement aimed at stopping street harassment. Hollaback! servers collect street harassment stories from victims around the globe to share, gather statistics, and create awareness. In this paper, we present a preliminary study focused on analyzing a small sample of Hollaback! stories submitted from New York city. The LIWC software [1] is used to measure the positive and negative emotions hidden in each story and correlate it to the socio-economic status of the location from which the story was submitted.