Street harassment

Street harassment is a form of sexual harassment that consists of unwanted comments, wolf-whistlings, "catcalling", and other actions by strangers in public areas. Taking photos of strangers without consent, as street photography and photojournalism practitioners do, is not street harassment.

Street harassment is also known as catcalling. Catcalling is defined as a whistle, shout, or a sexual move as a person walks by another person.

According to Stop Street Harassment, street harassment is "unwanted comments, gestures, and actions forced on a stranger in a public place without their consent and is directed at them because of their actual or perceived sex, gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation." In much of South Asia, the term is called "eve teasing".

A number of studies from around the world have attempted to assess the prevalence of street harassment.

A 2014 study of 2,000 Americans was commissioned by an activist group and conducted by GfK. 65% of women and 25% of men reported having been the victims of street harassment in their lives. 41% of women and 16% of men said they had been physically harassed in some way, such as by being followed, flashed, or groped.

The Canadian government sponsored a large data research project in 1993 called the Violence Against Women Survey. In the data sample of over 12,000 women, 85% said they were victims of harassment by a stranger.

In a 2002 survey of Beijing residents, 58% cited public buses as a common location for sexual harassment.

Additional studies on the prevalence of public harassment have been conducted in the United Kingdom, Poland, Egypt, India, Israel, South Korea, Yemen, and others.

Members of the LGBT community may be particularly susceptible. 66% of LGBT respondents in a 2012 European Union survey said that they avoid holding hands in public for fear of harassment and assault. 50% said they avoid certain places or locations, and the places they listed as most unsafe to be open about their sexual orientations were "public transport" and "street, square, car parking lot, or other public space." The 2014 GfK survey of Americans also reported higher incidence of harassment for LGBT people. According to the Stop Street Harassment national survey, LGBT men are 17 percent more likely to experience physical aggressive harassment and 20 percent more likely to encounter verbal harassment than heterosexual men.

...
Wikipedia