"Loose girls bring bad boys into safe neighbourhoods”

Associate Professor Atreyee Sen has recently contributed to the book Security Blurs : The Politics of Plural Security Provision with the chapter '"Loose girls bring bad boys into safe neighbourhoods": Analysing urban security anxieties and the everyday logics of blurred moral policing in urban India.'

Many studies on small-scale civil policing, usually referred to as informal vigilantism, show that interventions in poor localities remain independent of private and state-sponsored security actors. In this chapter, the author shows how an unconventional collaboration between low-ranked policemen, migrant security guards, and lower class female civilians opens up an analytical space for understanding a variety of “urban security blurs”. These blurs, in the context of her research in marginalised Mumbai neighbourhoods, refers to the range of actors and actions involved in regulating the low-end, everyday politics of moral policing over lovers (using public places for intimacy and sexual experimentation), and in developing moral treatises on poor people’s legitimate access to public spaces in the commercial city.

Atreyee Sen, Loose girls bring bad boys into safe neighbourhoods": Analysing urban security anxieties and the everyday logics of blurred moral policing in urban India, Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision, December 2018.