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80% of Northern Irish women first endured sexist behavior as children

Four in five women surveyed in Northern Ireland said their first experience of sexist behavior or harassment by men happened when they were children, according to a new study.

Kim McFalone, a Ph.D. researcher from the University of Manchester, surveyed 211 women in the country who had experienced staring, sexual comments, touching, catcalling, flashing and other behavior that made them uncomfortable.

She found that 80% said they had first experienced this before the age of 17—25% had experienced it before the age of 11, and 55% when aged between 11 and 16 years.

Her study, which is ongoing, also found that almost half (47%) of the 221 women surveyed had, while children or adults, experienced flashing by a man, and 93% had been harassed by men wolf-whistling or cat-calling.

The research was carried out against a background of a gradual increase in violence against women since the end of the Troubles. Sexual violence has increased every year since 1998 and reached the highest recorded level in 2024. Northern Ireland has the second-highest levels of femicide in Europe.

"I found it quite alarming that four out of five respondents first experienced behavior from a man which made them feel uncomfortable as children, aged 16 or under," McFalone told the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Manchester on Wednesday, April 23.

"Many interviewees noted they were harassed while they were in their school uniform, including a lot of catcalling from adult men in the street or inappropriate comments from adult men who they knew. There are obvious imbalanced power dynamics here, because their age suggests a vulnerability and lack of confidence to challenge this behavior," says McFalone.

"The other circumstance for unwanted behavior was while they were working in their first part-time job as a teenager, with adult male customers making sexual or otherwise inappropriate comments to them while they were working. A young girl working her first job probably isn't going to feel able to challenge this behavior or speak to someone about it."

McFalone also carried out interviews with affected women. One told her she was 13 years old when she first was "cat-called in a school uniform" by "fully grown men." Another said, "I worked for a pizza place as my first job—surprisingly the worst sort of male attention I got, which was borderline illegal, was when I was 15."