Sexual harassment
From unwelcome sexual jokes, remarks, and touching, to rape and femicide, sexual harassment against women and girls—most often committed by men—happens frequently in multiple spaces. This includes, for example, streets, transport (buses, bicycles, taxis, trains, etc.), in and around schools, parks, and market spaces, in public toilets, online, and at water and food distribution sites.
Sexual harassment often occurs in workplaces, affecting decent work, the health and dignity of workers and undermining productivity and career advancement. In public life, it is used to silence women leaders and activists. Information and communications technologies are being used to further perpetuate sexual harassment, exposing women and girls to abuse, including through the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images.
Rooted in harmful norms
Drivers of sexual harassment include gender inequality and harmful social norms. These excuse and normalize discrimination and violence against women and girls, leading to persistent gaps in addressing sexual harassment, such as:
- A lack of specific, valid, comparable, and systematically collected data, and limited capacities to produce it.
- Inadequate legislation and policies to prevent and respond to sexual harassment.
- Shortfalls in enforcement, even where laws exist.
- Weak or absent mechanisms for confidential reporting, and for holding perpetrators to account.
Joint efforts are needed
Multiple stakeholders need to work together across sectors to prevent sexual harassment from occurring in the first place wherever it occurs—in public spaces, workplaces, and online. A comprehensive multistakeholder response requires committed actions by national and local governments, the United Nations, the private sector, women’s rights organizations, and other civil society organizations, media, and others.
Effective strategies include:
- Investing in closing data gaps related to sexual harassment in multiple settings.
- Dismantling structural inequalities as fundamental to prevention and to cultures of dignity and respect.
- Centring support services on the rights and needs of women victims and survivors.
- Establishing comprehensive legal frameworks along with workplace and institutional policies, with support for capacity strengthening, funding, and other resources to implement them.
- Developing robust reporting and accountability mechanisms.
- Raising awareness and transforming social norms (individual, social, and institutional) that tolerate or encourage sexual harassment, create barriers to reporting it, and impede women’s participation, including in partnerships that address community safety. This includes multi-level strategies engaging men and boys to transform patriarchal masculinities that act as drivers of sexual harassment in offline and online settings, including through the manosphere.
