Younger women far more likely to see wolf-whistling and cat-calling as sexual harassment, compared to older generations

The government have said that they are working to make the streets safer for women, and while they have rejected making misogyny a hate crime, they are considering making sexual harassment a criminal offence. YouGov polling finds that there are differing views amongst the public about what exactly is classed as sexual harassment.

Approaching women in a public place or paying them a compliment is not generally sexual harassment, say Britons

Can you approach women in a public place? According to the majority of the British public (82%), starting a conversation with a woman you don’t know in public would not usually be sexual harassment, and neither is complimenting a woman on what she is wearing (85%).

Conversely, for many behaviours there is a clear consensus that they would at least usually be deemed sexual harassment, such as sending unsolicited explicit images (94%), making lewd comments to a woman (92%), intentionally following someone in the street (81%), taking photos of women without their consent (68%) and talking to women when they have asked to be left alone (68%).

Other behaviours, and arguably the most common ones, are less clear-cut.

Although there is general agreement amongst the British public that wolf-whistling and cat-calling are behaviours that would usually be deemed sexual harassment, the issue is more complicated when we look at specific age and gender groups.

For starters, men are actually slightly more likely to think that wolf-whistling and cat-calling are sexual harassment than women – 64% of men say this would always or usually be harassment, compared to 59% of women. This is despite men being subject to it far less frequently than women: just one in 12 (8%) men have experienced wolf-whistling or cat-calling, compared to six in 10 (62%) women.

Amongst women, attitudes on whether wolf-whistling and cat-calling are classed as sexual harassment or not strongly differ across the generations. Eight in ten women aged 18-29 (82%) would consider this to always or usually be harassment, compared to less than half (44%) of women over 60. When asked to think about personally experiencing this behaviour, a quarter (24%) of women over 60 say they would find it acceptable to be wolf-whistled or cat-called (with 16% saying they would be flattered), compared to just 5% of women in the youngest age group.

This generational difference is also present amongst men, but less pronounced – a third (66%) of men aged 18-24 say wolf-whistling and cat-calling would always, or usually, be sexual harassment, compared to 58% of men over 60.

Although winking is generally seen as being a much more acceptable behaviour, with 73% of the general population saying it would usually not, or never be, classed as sexual harassment, similar age differences are also present. A quarter of women aged 18-29 (27%) see winking as something that is usually sexual harassment, compared to just 12% of women over 60. Likewise, when people are asked to put themselves in the situation of being winked at just 18% of women aged 18-29 say they would find it acceptable, compared to three in 10 women over 60 (30%).

See full results here