Patterns of harassment and violence against women in Central and Eastern Europe: the role of the socioeconomic context and gender norms in international comparisons
Patterns of harassment and violence against women in Central and Eastern Europe: the role of the socioeconomic context and gender norms in international comparisons

Summary/Abstract: We use data from an international survey conducted in eight countries of Central and Eastern Europe and apply the method of multivariate reweighting to study the role of socio-economic characteristics and gender norms for the extent of underreporting of the prevalence of more discreet forms of gender-based abuse and harassment. We find that gender norms and attitudes towards abuse are responsible for a large part of the underreporting of harassment in Georgia and Russia, while differences in socio-economic characteristics are the key driving factors behind the underestimated levels of harassment in Belarus. We argue that a better understanding of the crosscountry variation in the scale of discriminative behaviours against women needs to be based on a careful methodological design of internationally comparable surveys. In countries with high gender inequalities there is a clear need for policies aimed at increasing awareness and sensitivity towards more discreet abusive behaviours towards women.

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