While data on sexual violence is often gathered by large international organizations such as the United Nations, sexual harassment is dramatically underreported, as experts say many women find it difficult to acknowledge they are victims of such behavior.
The issue is further complicated by the lack of a common global standard to analyze harassment, say experts, who point to different cultural understandings of the behavior.
The magnitude of sexual aggression toward women has always been difficult to quantify, but the #MeToo campaign, encouraged by actress Alyssa Milano in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, gives a better sense of the problem. In the first 24 hours following Milano’s invitation to women to share their personal experiences by replying “Me Too” to her Facebook post, the social media platform received 4.5 million posts. On Twitter, her tweet drew 70,000 replies, while another 1.7 million tweets on the topic have been posted, according to the social media platform. More than 85 countries have registered more than 1,000 tweets with the “MeToo” hashtag.
If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet. pic.twitter.com/k2oeCiUf9n
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano)
The campaign includes posts about sexual aggression toward women around the world, from sentences uttered to them in the wrong context to sexual abuse and marital rape.
Experts say the campaign represents a revolution.
“What’s happening now is fantastic and it’s for the first time in our history as women that we can speak the same language of sorrow and despair and of subordination,” says Andrea Molocea, a women’s rights activist in the Czech Republic.
Molocea, a Romanian native, is one of the many voices around the world that joined the #MeToo campaign with stories about being groped in the streets of her home country, receiving catcalls, and growing up in a patriarchal society that justified aggressive male behavior.
“I learned that if a man pulls at your pigtails or lifts your skirt, he likes you,” Molocea says.
An increased tolerance toward “machismo” is also something that Adriana Abdenur, a research fellow at Igarape Institute, a think tank in Brazil, experienced while growing up in that country. As an adult, she says she has witnessed law enforcement authorities often failing to understand the sensitivities of sexual assault, which in turn make women more reluctant to share their stories.
“If you are raped and you go to the police in Rio de Janeiro, if they even listen to you, you go into the same office where your aggressor is being held,” Abdenur says. “So you are trying to report your rape and your rapist is next to you.”
Women in South Asia report similar issues with authorities.
“Most girls don’t even report being harassed because police end up sexually assaulting them again,” says one woman from Pakistan who didn’t wish to reveal her identity.
While there are many studies on sexual violence around the world, there is little research on sexual harassment, as this phenomenon is harder to define and has come about as a concept only in the recent decades.
“Sexual harassment were two words that didn’t particularly go together and had no particular cultural meaning,” says Sara Collina, professor of gender studies at Georgetown University.
According to the World Health Organization, or WHO, about one in three women worldwide has experienced physical and/or sexual violence, and almost one-third of women who have been in a relationship put up with physical and/or sexual domestic violence. Another 0.3 to 11.5 percent of women reported sexual violence by someone other than a partner since the age of 15. In the European Union alone, 33 percent of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence since the age of 15, while five percent in the same age range have been raped.
“Many women are afraid of disclosing their stories because they are afraid about how people will view them,” says Andria Hayes-Birchler, director of Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning at Women for Women International, a nonprofit organization that offers support for women who survived war. “In many cases women can feel that they don’t have rights or they are not aware of the rights, or maybe they literally don’t have these rights.”
While it is easier to label and put a stop to physical aggression and violence, putting an end to sexual harassment seems almost impossible, experts say, because it relies on non-physical actions that may be difficult to interpret.
What’s more, harassment is also difficult to prosecute and it’s usually better monitored in the workplace or in school. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in the United States alone there have been around 30,000 reported cases of sexual harassment at work in 2015. Data from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center shows one in five women is sexually assaulted in college. Outside of these environments, though, information is far more challenging to obtain.
“What we’re allowed to do and what we’re allowed to say depends on where we are,” says Collina with Georgetown. “You are allowed to be a white supremacist misogynist who wishes harm on all women on this planet and you can have a party in your own home celebrating that, decorating your whole house with posters saying that. That’s the world we live in and we call that freedom of expression.”
More than 45 percent of people in the U.S. are friends with someone who has already used the MeToo hashtag, with men themselves having initiated campaigns of their own – #IHave, #IDidThat, and #IWill — confessing they have witnessed, condoned or engaged in sexual harassment and promising they will change their perception on the matter.
#IWill shame any man I hear making misogynistic remarks or making inappropriate actions about or to any woman.
— Popa Tunes (@popa2unes)
But experts say changing perception on acceptable sexual behavior has always taken time and strong social involvement.
“These campaigns are good because even when they’ll go away and people will forget about them, what won’t go away are the ideas that women around the world now have,” Molocea says. “There is a time for absorbing emotions and there is a time for healing and then there is a time for fighting. Next time when there will be a call for action to defend their rights, women will be there.”
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How #MeToo Has Awoken Women Around The World originally appeared on usnews.com
