US expat reveals one act she has never experienced in Australia

Sophia Kim, who lives in Sydney, took to TikTok to reveal she realised that she has never been catcalled by construction workers while living in Australia.

“No one is whistling, no one says anything disturbing,” she told her followers.

“People just let me walk in peace here.”

She clarified that it was solely her experience living in the eastern suburbs, Parramatta and the CBD.

But added she had similar experience in Queensland and Melbourne.

In the video’s caption she called it a “refreshing” experience.

Not everyone agreed with the take.

“No, they do cat call you! Only when you’re underage tho,” one person commented on the video.

Another said: “They only do to teenagers! I got it the other day randomly after a few years. it’s coz older ones will go off at them.”

However, one insisted it was because construction workers would be fired if they catcalled people on the streets.

A 2015 Cornell University, conducted in collaboration with Hollaback!, revealed that 84 per cent of women experienced street harassment – which catcalling falls under – for the first time before they were 17.

The study ran for four months, and was made available to respondents in 22 different countries.

“We hear stories of street harassment every day and, even so, this data shocked us,” said Hollaback! deputy director Debjani Roy when the data was released.

“We can no longer dismiss street harassment as a ‘little problem,’ this is everyone’s problem.”

A whopping 71 per cent of women around the world had been followed, while half of responders said they had been groped.

Meanwhile, a study published in the journal Psychology & Sexuality showed while most men don’t do it for misogynistic reasons, they do have a higher hostility in regards to sexism.

One of the researchers, Kari A. Walton, told PsyPost: “While most catcallers claimed no desire to demean or harm women with their actions (rather, they expressed a desire for the victim to feel flattered and attracted in response, and least frequently endorsed a desire to provoke negative emotions such as anger or fear), their attitudes and behaviours conflict with their stated intentions, as women tend to experience negative emotions in response to being catcalled.

“In other words, many catcallers appear to interpret and intend their behaviour as innocent flirting without realising their victim is likely to feel uncomfortable by their actions and to be impacted negatively by them in a variety of ways.”