The violently gender-equal Nordic welfare states

Sexual harassment is one of the most common forms of violence
against women (FRA, 2014), although there is a lack of research and
empirical evidence on its prevalence, consequences and how to prevent
it (Latcheva, 2017). This evidence matters, as there is a need for researchbased
preventive instruments to tackle sexual harassment (Simonsson,
2020). The different forms that sexual harassment takes range widely in
their degree of severity. All forms, however, create a cultural environment
that harms, whether or not it provides an ‘entry point’ to other forms of
violence against women, including embodied acts of sexual or physical
violence. If violence against women is understood as autotelic – meaning
here that different forms are interrelated and thus correlated – then sexual
harassment can be taken to be indicative of a broader climate of violence
against women. Thus, in this chapter we focus on empirical measurements
of violence and violence against women, with the understanding that it
nevertheless is informative about the sexual harassment taking place within
the Nordic countries.1