It’s International Women’s Day, which means news outlets in the West are clamoring to prove that women in the First World are oppressed. They will be doing this while ignoring women who face acid attacks, child marriages and genital mutilation in countries where women are actually oppressed.
In the United Kingdom, survey group YouGov teamed up with the End Violence Against Women organization to promote a survey showing that more than a third of British women claim to have experienced unwanted sexual touching in public.
First I will remind everyone that this is a self-reported survey, so already the findings are questionable, as anyone can say anything in a survey without having to back up their claims. Second, this was an incredibly small sampling of women, with about 889 filling out the survey. The U.K. has a population of more than 32 million women, so 889 is just a drop in the bucket, and we don’t know how those surveyed were selected. Those predisposed to believe they had been harassed may have jumped at the chance to take the survey. We don’t know, because the survey methods were not included.
The survey’s big finding was that two-thirds of women said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment. As with surveys in the U.S. purporting to show massive numbers of women being raped, the definition of sexual harassment includes really anything the women perceived as uncomfortable. In two different measures of sexual harassment, “staring” was included in the description of “unwanted attention (non-contact) of a sexual nature.”
How many times have we thought someone was staring just because our eyes met when we looked around the room? Doesn’t mean they were actually staring, they could have just been looking around the room at the same time or completely zoned out and happened to be looking in your general direction.
With this description, more than half of British women said they had received unwanted attention.
Fewer women (35 percent) claimed they had experienced “unwanted body/physical contact of a sexual nature.” Here again we have to wonder whether the contact was perceived as sexual or just an accidental touch on the London Underground due to closed spaces.
And whatever problem the U.K. had with alleged sexual harassment and touching, it appears to have been going away in the past year. The vast majority of women who said they had experienced unwanted attention or contact said they had experienced it, “but not in the last 12 months.”
What’s also being left out of reports on this headline-grabbing survey is the large numbers of women who say they have never received such unwanted attention. Forty-one percent of women said they hadn’t experienced “shouts, insults, staring, name calling, etc.” Thirty-three percent of women said they had never experienced “wolf whistling, sexual comments, staring [see it here again?], exposure, etc.” And a full 62 percent of women said they had never experienced unwanted physical contact of a sexual nature.
Media outlets are also ignoring the high number of men who said they had experienced “shouts, insults, staring, name calling, etc.” Those reporting this brush it off because 46 percent of men reported experiencing this attention compared to a higher percentage (55 percent) of women experiencing it. But in this category (in the other two categories, less than 10 percent of men admitted to receiving the unwanted attention), a large percentage of men are also the “victims” of unwanted attention. This would suggest that, at least for this question, it’s really not a gender problem so much as a population problem.
Those are the numbers and caveats left out of the headlines, because news outlets love to write women-as-victim stories. These end up becoming damaging, causing more women to see themselves as victims and the world around them as dangerous, which keeps women from living their lives without fear. But I guess that’s what empowerment and equality mean today.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
