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

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 cross-country 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.