Aural assault: Obscene telephone calls

Patterns of conversational structure and telephone technology put a call recipient in a position where she or he is vulnerable to abuse by anonymous callers. Obscene telephone callers assault women by manipulating or violating conventions of conversational interaction and recognized categories of social relationships that have established telephone styles associated with them. Women create images of their assailants. These images reveal that they consider callers to be threatening, unpredictable outsiders, socially distant from themselves and the people they know. The opportunity exists for women to blame themselves for being victimized by callers. Call recipients judge whether their handling of a call has significance for their conceptions of themselves as women of good moral character. The treatment of call activity by agencies charged with controlling it as well as the responses of people whom women tell about their experiences create conflict over the definition that these acts are unambiguously wrong. The fact that it is women who are offended by gender-related harassment while the perpetrators are, ordinarily, more socially powerful men is a condition of this conflict.Special thanks to Howard S. Becker and Clinton R. Sanders for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.