The City Through Her Eyes: Gender-Based Harassment in Public Spaces in Urban India

Gender-based harassment in public spaces affects women directly through victimization and indirectly through fear. We measure these dual effects in urban India, where harassment is widely regarded as pervasive. Surveying over 4,000 women recruited in public spaces in New Delhi and Bengaluru, we document that 65% of women in New Delhi and 29% in Bengaluru experienced harassment in public spaces in the past year. Past-year prevalence of groping, stalking, or sexual assault is 41% in New Delhi and 14% in Bengaluru. Both frequent, less severe forms of harassment and rarer, more severe forms generate anxiety among women; for example, 46% of women in New Delhi and 25% in Bengaluru report feeling extremely anxious about sexual assault when in public spaces. Not all of the indirect effects track the across-city variation in experienced harassment: in both cities, roughly 70\% of women report that fear of harassment affects whether they work. Finally, on measurement, we show that measured prevalence is more sensitive to questionnaire design where harassment is less common and victims have fewer and less recent incidents to recall.