Street harassment is an under-researched topic, but each existing study shows that street harassment is a significant and prevalent problem. The following statistics focus on prevalence.

Thirteen Academic & Community Studies:

1. Indianapolis: In one of the first street harassment studies ever conducted, Carol Brooks Gardner, associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, interviewed 293 women in Indianapolis, Indiana, over several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The women were from every race, age, class, and sexual orientation category of the general population in Indiana and the United States. Gardner found that every single woman (100 percent) could cite several examples of being harassed by unknown men in public and all but nine of the women classified those experiences as “troublesome.” (1)

2. Canada: Using a national sample of 12,300 Canadian women ages 18 and older from 1994, sociology professors Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh studied the impact of street harassment on women’s perceived sense of safety in 2000. During their research, they found that over 80 percent of the women surveyed had experienced male stranger harassment in public and that those experiences had a large and detrimental impact on their perceived safety in public. (2)

3. California Bay Area: Laura Beth Nielsen, professor of sociology and the law at Northwestern University conducted a study of 100 women’s and men’s experiences with offensive speech in the California San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2000s. She found that 100 percent of the 54 women she asked had been the target of offensive or sexually-suggestive remarks at least occasionally: 19 percent said every day, 43 percent said often, and 28 percent said sometimes. Notably, they were the target of such speech significantly more often than they were of “polite” remarks about their appearance. (3)

4. Beijing: A 2002 survey of 200 citizens in Beijing, China, showed that 70 percent had been subjected to a form of sexual harassment. Most people said it occurred on public transportation, including 58 percent who said it occurred on the bus. (4)

5. Chicago: During the summer of 2003, members of the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team in Chicago surveyed 168 neighborhood girls and young women (most of whom were African American or Latina) ages 10 to 19 about street harassment and interviewed 34 more in focus groups. They published their findings in a report titled “Hey Cutie, Can I Get Your Digits?” Of their respondents, 86 percent had been catcalled on the street, 36 percent said men harassed them daily, and 60 percent said they felt unsafe walking in their neighborhoods. (5)

6. Tokyo: Groping on trains, subways, and transit stations in Tokyo, Japan, is rampant. In a 2004 survey of 632 women who travel during rush-hour in Tokyo, nearly 64 percent of the women in their 20s and 30s said they were groped while commuting. (6) In 2008 in Tokyo alone there were 2,000 reported groping cases (and it is an underreported crime). (7)

7. Pakistan: In a study of more than 200 youth in Gujranwala, Pakistan, 96 percent of the girls experienced street harassment. (7.5)

8. New York City: In 2007, the Manhattan Borough President’s Office conducted an online questionnaire about sexual harassment on the New York City subway system with a total of 1,790 participants. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents identified as women. Of the respondents, 63 percent reported being sexually harassed and one-tenth had been sexually assaulted on the subway or at a subway station. Due to collection methods used, the report “Hidden in Plain Sight: Sexual Harassment and Assault in the New York City Subway System” is not statistically significant, but it suggests that a large number of women experience problems on the subway system. (8)

9. Egypt: The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights surveyed 2,000 Egyptian men and women and 109 foreign women in four governorates in the country, including Cairo and Giza, about sexual harassment on Egyptian streets. They published their findings in 2008. Eighty-three percent of Egyptian women reported experiencing sexual harassment on the street at least once and nearly half of the women said they experience it daily. Ninety-eight percent of the foreign women surveyed reported experiencing sexual harassment while in Egypt. Wearing a veil did not appear to lessen a woman’s chances of being harassed. About 62 percent of Egyptian men admitted to perpetrating harassment. (9)

10. Yemen: In Yemen, the Yemen Times conducted a survey on teasing and sexual harassment in Sana’a in 2009. Ninety percent of the 70 interviewees from Sana’a said they had been sexually harassed in public. Seventy-two percent of the women said they were called sexually-charged names while walking on the streets and 20 percent of this group said it happens on a regular basis. About 37 percent of the sample said they had experienced physical harassment. Like those in Egypt, these survey results implied that being veiled did not lessen the harassment, because wearing a veil in public is so common. (10)

11. India: Throughout 2009, the Centre for Equity and Inclusion surveyed 630 women of all ages and socioeconomic status in New Delhi and Old Delhi, India. Ninety-five percent of the women said their mobility was restricted because of fear of male harassment in public places. Another 82 percent said the bus is the most unsafe mode of public transportation for them because of male harassers. (11)

12. Korea: In 2010, a study of 828 salaried employees in an unnamed city in Korea shared their experiences with harassmetn during their commute. Foty-three percent of the people experienced harassmetn and 79 percent of them were women. Around 72 percent of the incidents occurred on subway cars, followed by buses at 27.3 percent and taxis at 1.1 percent. Nearly 60 percent said they experienced harassment between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. when most workers are on their way to work, while 17 percent were between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. while returning home from work. Only 18.2 percent strongly protested against the assailants and 6.3 percent shouted in anger. (12)

13. Tel Aviv, Israel: 83 percent of women in Tel Aviv reported experiencing street harassment in a study conducted by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality’s committee for advancing the status of women, with help from shelters for survivors of sexual assault and the Shatil organization. According to the survey, the group reporting the highest incidence of harassment included women aged 22-39. The most common forms of harassment are whistling in the street (64% of all respondents reported experiencing this ), cars beeping horns (61% ), knowing looks (45% ), suggestive remarks (40% ), inappropriate proposals (22% ), touching (21% ) and stalking (18% ). Also, 6% of respondents reported that they were victims of sexual abuse. (13)

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