Half of young Dutch women affected by sexually transgressive behavior last year

More than half of young women in the Netherlands said they were victims of sexually transgressive behavior last year. A total of 52 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 identified the problem. Additionally, 46 percent of girls between 16 and 18 said they were victims of sexually transgressive behavior in the past year, according to a report released on Friday by Statistics Netherlands and the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC).

By way of comparison, 15 percent of men in the same age groups reported having been a victim of out-of-bounds sexual behavior. Among all Dutch people aged 16 or older, 1 in 8 reported having experienced sexually transgressive behavior last year.

This amounts to 1.8 million people. It concerns sexual harassment, whether online or not, and physical sexual violence.

In the case of sexually transgressive behaviour, the perpetrator most often comes from outside a person's domestic group. In the case of offline sexual harassment, slightly more than half said that the perpetrator was unknown to them. The victims of online sexual harassment also indicated that in slightly more than half of the cases the offending person was a stranger to them.

On the other hand, in the case of physical sexual violence about 7 out of 10 victims knew the perpetrator.

The figures come from a monitoring service for domestic violence and sexually transgressive behavior run last year. This was a digital survey in which more than 24,000 people aged 16 and older participated in during the months of March and April 2022.