Via Hollaback Croatia, I was alerted to a 2007 study about sexual harassment on public transportation in Belgrade, Serbia. The report is not in English but Barbara at Hollaback Croatia translated the data for me.
Milena Raceta and Branislava Tanaskovic, who are in the psychology department at a university in Belegrade, interviewed 76 women, ages 20-29, in Belgrade, Serbia, about their experiences with sexual harassment on public transportation.
Of the 76 women, 96 percent said they’d experienced some form of sexual harassment, and 46 percent said it had happened more than twice.
The types of harassment they identified mostly involved physical contact: 66 percent said they’d experienced inappropriate rubbing, 58 percent said inappropriate touching, and 46 percent said a man had stood too near them. The rest had experienced other forms of harassment: 30 percent said men had inappropriately gazed at them, 22 percent said they’d been the target of public masturbation, eight percent said they’d experienced verbal harassment, and one percent didn’t specify the type.
The amount of physical harassment is stunning, especially compared with studies in Chicago and New York City‘s transit systems where the figures were closer to 10 percent, and I wonder if the verbal harassment is actually higher but the women weren’t identifying it as sexual harassment. Or maybe there is truly less verbal harassment than physical, just as there is in Japan, where there are high rates of groping on the subways but not high rates of verbal harassment.
