To ask how many women have either been sexually harassed in the street in the teenager or have a daughter who has?

[Carla786]

For context I'm Gen Z. I live in a very quiet neighbourhood & through my teens was never harassed. There's lots of building works in my area often but builders have always been fine & so has everyone else. I've never witnessed anyone else my age being harassed either (nor adult women). Some of my friends are the same, some unfortunately not (most don't live in my area)

However, I know this is not typical. I've read so much on here about people being harassed in school uniform, having daughters harassed etc. How common is this? Surveys show pretty high results too...

Was it always like this? Has it got worse or better? I've read some arguments it was worse in 70s-80s, others that online misogyny & porn has made harassment of teens worse.

Yup, frequently. Even now in my late 40s, heavily overweight with grey hair, I still get yobs in vans shouting stuff. And the odd gang of teenage boys in town, all egged on by each other.

What I look like appears to be irrelevant. It’s purely harassment, intended to intimidate you.

DD is barely into her teens and fortunately utterly oblivious to the couple of comments I’ve heard about her already.

Or was someone who 'took it as a compliment' 🙄

I don’t think it’s anywhere as bad as what it used to be because of camera phones , doorbell / street cameras plus if reported it’s taken more seriously by police / employers .

All thee of us have, more than once.

Lots of wolf whistles from builders in the 70’s/80’s…otherwise, no.

I used to work in a shop as a teenager and some of the stuff that grown men said to me was absolutely disgusting. A lot of them were builders come to think of it. When I look back on it now I just think how dare they speak to me like that, I didn’t know what to think at the time . I also hated walking past groups of teenage boys because they would almost always make some comment. And I stopped cycling for a while because men would shout things out car windows at me. I think most young women experienced similar at the time. I hope things have improved . That was 20 years ago

I was a teen in the early '00s. I was harassed pretty infrequently, though some of the experiences were quite scary. One guy tried following me home from my part-time job, another started masturbating while sitting across from me on the bus. Revolting. Interestingly, I never remember having problems with builders.

I do remember the random sexual comments being worse when I was with my twin sister. So many men fetishise twin girls.

I was harassed from the age of 9 onwards. Only stopped when I reached 40. My youngest dd has been harassed a few times on the street (she's 19) and my eldest has been harassed online.

It started for me at about 12, like many other pp. I remember being out with a friend, on an escalator in a shopping centre. A grown man stood a few steps up, staring at us. When I glanced at him, he said something pretty aggressively. It was very intimidating. From then, sexually assaulted twice by boys in my own year at secondary school, and all the rest of it, calls, comments, etc when out and about, that others have described. As I got older, i couldn't leave the house without some sort of unwanted attention. Grabbed in the street in my twenties, flashed at from a man parked on the street, old man masturbating on a train in front of me and a friend. Relentless really. It died down mostly in my late thirties and early forties, when I became a bit fat, and always out with my children. Now they're at school, and I've lost weight, I can sense the change again. Nothing inappropriate said so far, but lots of looks, including cars slowing down to look etc. Men blatantly looking me up and down. I'm nearly 50.

Recebtly, I've seen men staring at my daughter, aged 12. This started when she was 11. She notices it too.

That's really awful re twins. I have a lesbian friend who said to me angrily once that 'men are obsessed with violating boundaries' (this was re Reddit subs for lesbians being taken over by TIMs). I thought at the time that was a small minority but it seems to me increasingly that a lot more men are perverts in one way or another than one wants to think...☹️

I think if someone's being grabbed etc people HAVE to intervene if they see. I get concern about being attacked (which I'd have myself), but it depends on context. A man going to work etc wouldn't normally want to get caught up in an altercation, so if others challenge it should deescalate.

True....otoh there does still seem to be a lot if it around judging by this thread alone.

CCTV etc should help but otoh a random man can hardly be arrested etc from CCTV footage.

How old are men who tend to do this?

In countries like India, Egypt, Italy etc sexual harassment tends to be by bored, unemployed, misogynistic young men. But a lot of the harassers here seem to be older men.

Someone in a van beeped me and asked me to show him my tits when I was out running earlier this week. I'm 48. Nothing has changed.

If it were just van men & builders etc you could argue it's just men from professions with a macho culture that encourages sexism. But sadly it's far more widespread than that, as this thread shows...

Well pretty much everyday from about 12 to 35. Still happens sometimes but is much less socially acceptable now. When I was young it was very common.

That's awful. Did the shop owner not want to help? I get if you didn't want to ask, there seems to have been a lot of tolerance for it among workplaces often...and maybe still is.
Shop/builder incidents could at least have been wiped out decades ago if businesses had enforced boundaries.

I think literally every woman.
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been subject to this sort of behavior

Born in the 80’s so I was a teen in the 90’s. Harassed many times. Grabbed in nightclubs, shouted at from cars and touched at work (I was a waitress in a posh hotel when I was 16).

I literally read the title and thought- who hasn’t?
Literally get beeped at / comments if I ever wear a skirt - it’s depressing

Honestly there have been so many times men have behaved inappropriately, I would imagine they would pass it off as banter or declare that men can't even talk to women anymore. It happened to me in a meeting at work about three years ago when I was junior to the two other men there who were bothe c-suite level, one of them called the other out on it so there is some hope but honestly a lot of men are gross, it's always a way of exerting their power and reminding women of their place.

I have had the odd comment for sure, the odd wolf whistle from when I was about fifteen on. I didn't grow curves until mid teens. I'm not super curvy even now, and sometimes I wonder if that's why I haven't been bothered all that much by men. Certainly the experience some women have had of almost constant groping has never been mine, I'm thankful to say. Oh, and I'm an elder millennial, 42 years old.

I've heard people say you become invisible when you reach your 50s & 60s. All that happens is to some men often far younger you suddenly become a milf or a gilf. Some women thrive on it but I'd say the majority of women want to look their best without being objectified.

I had it all the time as a teenager and beyond. This was in the eighties. I was groped, leered at, whistled at, ‘complimented’ and insulted if I wasn’t grateful for said ‘compliments’. A man I worked with shouted across the office ‘Oh, ne pas toucher’ (he was NOT French btw😆) at a male colleague as he went to hand over a couple of files to me. The clear implication being that I didn’t like being touched, even though the poor guy had no intention of touching me in any way. Shouty bloke was deliberately trying to humiliate me because I always expressed my disdain when he casually slid his arm around my waist or shoulder and moved away. He had a daughter around my age FFS. I worked in a department predominantly made up of men. Most of them were fine, but a significant minority were awful. A lot of men openly exhibited sexist behaviour back then. Because they could. Bastards.

Nope . The shop owner wasn’t there most of the time but one time she witnessed something particularly horrible being said to me and ignored it. Actually one time a customer asked the shop manager for my number and she gave it to him. He rang me that night and told me things he would like to do to me on the phone. I hung up and he kept phoning and phoning. I ignored it but if it was nowadays I’d be going to the police and reporting it as sexual harassment. I didn’t really have a clue back then.