This essay is one in a series examining sexual harassment and assault. Sexual harassment and assault occur appallingly often. We have an absurdly long way to go as a society to correct this problem.
To make progress on persistent problems, as this one clearly is, it’s often helpful to try to deeply understand the forces that drive and maintain the problem. As a small step in that direction, I ran a study surveying victims and perpetrators of sexual harassment and sexual assault, collecting quantitative and qualitative data. I’m summarizing the findings in a series of posts.
This data has helped me understand this problem a bit better, and I hope you find it does the same for you. Note that this study only scratches the surface of this very complex topic.
Warning: this post contains extensive discussion about and numerous accounts of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
I surveyed 574 people in the United States online, 52% of whom are female, using Positly.com, our participant recruitment platform. They answered multiple-choice questions about their experience (or lack thereof) as victims and/or perpetrators of sexual harassment and sexual assault, as well as a number of questions about their other characteristics. Additionally, 46% were also asked to give free-form written responses explaining some of their multiple-choice answers. The participants for this study leaned somewhat more liberal and younger than the broader United States population.
Since this is a self-report survey, people may be answering in a way that is socially desirable or otherwise obscuring the truth. That being said, the survey was 100% anonymous, and the survey takers were aware that it was anonymous, so they had nothing to lose from answering honestly. But still, it seems likely that the rates of being the victim and/or perpetrator of sexual harassment and sexual assault are underreported here.
PREVELANCE
Here are the high-level results regarding how frequently participants reported being victors and/or perpetrators:
- Cat-calling (by/to a stranger): 32% of males and 81% of females reported being victims, 18% of males and 9% of females reported being perpetrators
- Verbal sexual harassment: 25% of males and 62% of females reported being victims, 9% of males and 5% of females reported being perpetrators
- Physical sexual harassment: 18% of males and 45% of females reported being victims, 4% of males and 4% of females reported being perpetrators
- Unwanted persistent sexual advances: 33% of males and 59% of females reported being victims, 9% of males and 4% of females reported being perpetrators
- Unwanted requests for sexual favors: 25% of males and 50% of females reported being victims, 6% of males and 4% of females reported being perpetrators
- Unwanted sexual activity (which was continued after the perpetrator had reason to believe it was unwanted): 18% of males and 37% of females reported being victims, 8% of males and 4% of females reported being perpetrators
GENDER DIFFERENCES
Unsurprisingly, males are much more likely to be perpetrators than females, and females are much more likely to be victims than males.
We assigned each participant a score from 0 to 6 based on the number of types of sexual harassment or sexual assault they had experienced (“victim scores”), and another score from 0 to 6 based on the number of types of sexual harassment or sexual assault they had perpetrated (“perpetrator scores”).
Victim scores: females averaged 3.35 yes answers versus 1.52 for males, which means that females had about 2.2 times the level of agreement to having been the victim of different types of sexual harassment or sexual assault than males, a statistically significant result (p<0.01).
Perpetrator scores: males averaged 0.54 yes answers versus 0.30 for females, which means males had about 1.8 times more agreement to having conducted sexual harassing or sexual assaulting behaviors, a statistically significant result (p<0.01).
51% of women reported having experienced 4 or more of the 6 items in the list above as victims, vs. 19% for males.
RELATIVE FREQUENCIES OF REPORTS OF BEING A VICTIM AND PERPETRATOR
Far more people report being victims than report being perpetrators.
If we look at all participants in the study, they reported having experienced 2.4 of these types of events on average as victims, and only 0.44 of these types of events as perpetrators, meaning that people reported 5.5 times more of these events occurring from the victim perspective than the perpetrator perspective.
Another way to look at this is that while 70% of participants in the study reported having experienced 1 or more of these events as a victim, only 25% admit to having been the perpetrator in one or more of these types of events. Similarly, while 55% say they have experienced 2 or more of these types of events as victims, only 10% say they have perpetrated 2 or more. The gender breakdown is that 20% of females say they have perpetrated one or more, vs. 30% of males, and 6% of females say they have perpetrated 2 or more, vs. 14% of males.
What to make of the number of reports of being victims of these events being so dramatically smaller than the number of reports of being perpetrators of these events?
One possible interpretation is that victims are being much more honest than perpetrators, and many of the actual perpetrators are simply lying about things they’ve done. Another possibility is that perpetrators are not purposely lying, but classifying their actions differently than the victims (i.e., the victim views what happened as sexual harassment, but the perpetrator doesn’t view it as sexual harassment). It would make a self-interested kind of sense that perpetrators wouldn’t want to admit even to themselves that their past actions were bad. A third possible interpretation is that a much wider range of people are victims than are perpetrators (e.g., the repeat offenders produce many victims, raising the number of victims far above the number of perpetrators). This is consistent with other data that suggests that offending once is a strong risk factor for offending again. A fourth possibility is that victims are much more likely to readily remember their experiences of being victims than their perpetrators are to remember their experiences of being perpetrators. The reality may be a mix of these.
CONCLUSION
So, what do we learn here? It seems that it’s common to be a victim and also common (though less so) to be a perpetrator of sexual harassment and/or assault. This is also an inherently gendered issue, with very different rates of victimization and perpetration when dividing by gender.
— APPENDIX —
DEMOGRAPHICS
The demographics of the sample leaned younger than the broader U.S. population (mean age 37, median 35, with 50% of people within the range 29 to 44). The population was also more liberal than the broader U.S. (especially more socially liberal, but also more economically liberal). The median and also the most common education level of participants was a bachelor’s degree. The mean household income was $62,000, with a median of $50,000 (a little less than the U.S. household median of about $60,000). Please keep the above demographics in mind when considering the results, as they may have been different for a different population.
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If you’re curious exactly how the questions were asked about whether someone was a victim or perpetrator for each of the 6 categories mentioned above, here are the wordings. Each of these was asked as a “yes/no” question, and the number of yes’s on the victim questions gave each person their 0-6 victimization score, whereas the number of yes’s on the perpetrator questions gave each person their 0-6 perpetration score.
Cat-calling
- “Have you ever been cat-called by a person you didn’t know (i.e., had a stranger make a sexual whistle, shout, or comment of a sexual nature towards you)?”
- “Have you ever cat-called a person that you don’t know (by making a sexual whistle, shout, or comment of a sexual nature)?”
Verbal sexual harassment
- “Have you ever had a person verbally harass you in a manner that was sexual in nature?”
- “Have you ever verbally harassed another person in a manner that was sexual in nature?”
Physical sexual harassment
- “Have you ever had a person physically harass you in a manner that was sexual in nature?”
- “Have you ever physically harassed another person in a manner that was sexual in nature?”
Unwanted persistent sexual advances
- “Have you ever had a person make unwanted sexual advances towards you that they continued to make even though they had reason to believe their sexual advances were unwanted?”
- “Have you ever made unwanted sexual advances towards a person that you continued to make even though you believed the sexual advances were unwanted?”
Unwanted requests for sexual favors
- “Have you ever had a person make unwanted requests for sexual favors from you that they continued to make even though they had reason to believe their requests were unwanted?”
- “Have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors that you continued to make even though you believed the requests were unwanted?”
Unwanted sexual activity
- “Have you ever had a person engage in sexual activity with you when they had reason to doubt whether you actually wanted to engage in that sexual activity, but they continued anyway?”
- “Have you ever had sexual activity with a person when you had reason to doubt whether the person actually wanted to engage in that sexual activity, but you continued anyway?”
This piece was first written on May 5, 2021, and first appeared on my website on April 29, 2026.
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