SDG 5: Gender Equality | SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities | SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Ministry of Women and Child Development | National Commission for Women (NCW)
UN Women and Tulane University’s Normalized No More: An Evidence-Based Guide to Measuring Sexual Harassment offers a practical, evidence-based framework for measuring sexual harassment, emphasizing the need for standardized methodologies to understand its prevalence, forms, and impacts.
It argues that inconsistent definitions have historically led to significant shortfalls in policy and resource allocation. It calls for a universal, victim-centered definition: any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature—whether in-person or online—that causes harm, humiliation, or disruption to daily life. Global data reveals that while workplace harassment is frequently studied, harassment in public spaces and online platforms is often more prevalent, reaching rates between 70% and 90% in certain urban contexts.
Methodological Shifts and Prevalence The report advocates for several key changes to how harassment is tracked globally to produce quality, comparable data:
The Continuum of Forms: Beyond physical contact, the guide categorizes verbal, visual, and cyber harassment, including specific acts like quid pro quo coercion and unauthorized sharing of sexual content.
Measuring Injunctive Norms: A key recommendation is to move beyond tracking behavior (descriptive norms) to measuring Injunctive Norms, which assess how much harassment is tolerated or occurs with impunity within a community
Impact Mapping: Data collection must move beyond simple frequency to capture long-term consequences on mental health, mobility, and professional trajectories.
Bystander Dynamics: The guide emphasizes measuring positive bystander behavior—the willingness of witnesses to act—to provide information on the social acceptance of harassment within a community.
What are “Injunctive Norms” and why are they critical for measuring sexual harassment? Injunctive norms refer to an individual’s perception of which behaviors are socially approved or disapproved within a specific community. Unlike descriptive norms, which track perceptions of which behaviors are actually occurring, measuring injunctive norms helps policy stakeholders understand the social “climate of impunity.” In sexual harassment research, assessing these norms is vital for identifying if a community tolerates abuse or if there is a collective belief that such behaviors should be challenged, providing a baseline for designing targeted behavioral change interventions.
Policy Relevance
The 2026 UN Women framework provides a strategic blueprint for strengthening India’s legal and digital safety ecosystems.
Modernizing the POSH Act: The guidelines on Cyber Sexual Harassment provide a roadmap for updating India’s Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (POSH) Act, 2013, to explicitly cover remote-work and digital harassment threats.
Data-Driven Urban Planning: Adopting standardized safety surveys allows municipal corporations to utilize the Nirbhaya Fund for targeted infrastructure, such as improved lighting in public space “hotspots” identified through localized prevalence data.
Institutionalizing Last-Mile Delivery: Leveraging Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for crowd-sourced harassment tracking can provide the high-resolution, localized data needed for the National Commission for Women to implement predictive social interventions.
Formalizing Administrative Data: Strengthening Official Control Systems within police and justice intake forms to identify minimum variables for collection can enhance the quality of administrative data, which currently suffers from low disclosure rates.
Follow the full guide here: Normalized No More: An Evidence-Based Guide to Measuring Sexual Harassment