Sexual Violence Warning

Sexual harassment can occur through physical force, the threat of force, exploitation, or through the use of drugs or alcohol as part of the assault. The acts can incorporate rape, non-consensual touching, and/or sexual coercion.

Sexual violence can affect everybody, including women, men, nonbinary, and children. Although most sexual violence acts occur towards women, men are also strongly affected by sexual assault and often go undetected. Sexual assault statistics are often hard to attain as most cases go unreported. Three overlapping types of sexual harassment are described: physical, verbal, and visual.

-          Physical Harassment

Physical sexual harassment refers to the act of being non-consensually touched intimately, brushed against, hugged, kissed, or being forced to touch another person. Such includes the act of or an attempt to rape, sexually assault, pressure someone to take part in sexual acts, touching someone’s body non-consensually, sexual gestures, and sexually rubbing against someone.

-          Verbal Harassment

Verbal sexual violence is the use of written or spoken words to covey non-consensual sexual acts. It is the use of remarks, obscene, or insulting sounds such as, but not limited to catcalling, unwanted terms of endearment, inappropriate sexual jokes, whistling, sexual comments about clothing, asking about sexual fantasies, and spreading rumors about one’s sexual life.

-          Visual Harassment

Visual sexual violence refers to the act of being non-consensually exposed to private parts or receiving unwanted looks towards private areas. Such can take the form of unwanted nude photos, emails, and text messages of sexual nature, non-consensual looks, gestures, and nudity.