Almost half of Italian women have suffered harassment

ROME – Almost half of Italy’s women between the ages of 14 and 65 have been harassed at least once in their lives and over three million have suffered in some form in the last three years, according to Italy’s National Statistics Institute, ISTAT.

 The report, published Tuesday and detailed in the Corriere della Sera, analysed data collected in the course of 2015 and 2016, discovering that 8.8 million women (43.6 percent) had been affected by harassment in their lifetime.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most reported type of harassment was verbal. 24 percent of women interviewed had received verbal abuse and 20.3 percent had been followed.

 Though men also reported harassment, in 97 percent of cases the victims were female. 15.9 percent of women and 3.6 percent of men had suffered some form of physical harassment, defined in the report as either touching or kissing that the victim had not consented to.

 In cases of unwarranted physical contact, 60 percent of offences were carried out by strangers, while a further 15.8 percent were from those that the victims recognised only by sight.

 The picture is especially worrying for Italian women at work, where 8.9 percent reported harassment but where very few cases are reported.

 Corriere argued that the numbers reflected a “social and cultural problem so pressing and pervasive that it becomes almost invisible but also the signal for a change of action.” It comes after over hundred actresses, directors and other women in the Italian film industry published a joint letter denouncing Italy’s silence on sexual assault in Jan 2018.  

tw