Normalized no more: An evidenced-based guide to measuring sexual harassment

Sexual harassment is a pervasive and often normalized form of violence against women and girls, occurring across workplaces, public spaces, educational settings, and online environments. Yet inconsistent definitions and fragmented measurement approaches have limited the availability of reliable, comparable data-undermining effective prevention, policy design, and accountability.

This guide responds to those gaps by synthesizing global evidence and offering a clear, inclusive definition of sexual harassment that captures verbal, visual, physical, and technology-facilitated forms of abuse, across diverse settings and relationships. Drawing on validated survey instruments captured by the Evidence-based Measures of Empowerment for Research on Gender Equality (EMERGE), multi-country studies, and UN Women-supported data collection and research initiatives, the guide outlines key elements for robust measurement. These include recommended questions on:

• prevalence, frequency, and recency;
• place of occurrence;
• relationship to perpetrators;
• impacts on safety, mobility and wellbeing; and
• norms that enable or discourage harassment.

It also highlights complementary data sources-such as administrative records and citizen-generated data-to support a more comprehensive evidence base.

Designed for policymakers, national statistical offices, researchers, and practitioners, this guide offers concise, adaptable measures that can be integrated into existing surveys or used in standalone studies. By improving the quality and comparability of data, the guide supports more informed policies, stronger prevention strategies, and renewed commitment to making sexual harassment visible, measurable, and no longer normalized.

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