Suggestive gestures or noises, graphically obscene remarks — an everyday experience for many women across the world. In some European countries such behavior can land you with a fine or even a jail sentence.
But in Germany, verbal sexual harassment in public is not criminalized under sexual offences legislation passed in 2016, which made non-consensual sexualized acts of touching like groping a crime for the first time.
And nor do judges usually interpret it as coming under the provision of the country’s insult laws. In German criminal law, insult is regulated in Section 185 of the Criminal Code (StGB) and protects a person’s honor. It is an intentional expression of contempt or disregard for honor, which can result in a fine or imprisonment for up to one year.
Serious cases of verbal sexual harassment might be criminalized
The center-left Social Democrats(SPD) believe there is a legal loophole that urgently needs to be closed. “Verbal and non-verbal sexual harassment that is clearly unwanted, substantial in nature and targeted is worthy of punishment by the law,” senior SPD politician Sonja Eichwede told DW.
SPD politician Sonja Eichwede has drafted the party’s policy on verbal sexual harassment Image: dts-Agentur/picture alliance
Eichwede says it is a widespread problem that affects young women, in particular, and has a considerable impact. “This type of harassment intimidates victims massively and often leads to them withdrawing from public spaces. Language and behavior are a form of violence here.”
The Social Democrats say the English term “catcalling,” which is widely used in the German debate, trivializes the phenomenon. The term can be used to describe a range of behavior from wolf whistling to vile innuendo.
Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig (SPD) has said her ministry is currently examining legal options.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives say they will examine any concrete reform plans put forward. Susanne Hierl, legal spokesperson for the conservative parliamentary group, told German news magazine Spiegel that it was shameful how frequently women became victims of disrespectful and hurtful behavior. But the politician from the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, does not see additional legislation as the way of curbing verbal sexual harassment.
German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig is examining the options for a new lawImage: M. Popow/picture alliance
Gen Z push the issue onto the national agenda
It is not the first time that the Social Democrats have advocated a change in the law. In 2023, the SPD’s coalition partners in the center-left government, the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), opposed the move, criticizing it as impractical and “populist.” And an SPD initiative at the state level failed to find a majority in the country’s second legislative chamber, the Bundesrat, in early 2025.
Young women propelled the issue to national attention in 2019. Inspired by a New York precedent, a platform called Catcalls of Berlin encouraged women and minority groups to document instances of street harassment by chalking the phrases on the pavements where the incidents occurred to raise awareness about the issue.
A year later, in 2020, a 20-year-old student, Antonia Quell, submitted a petition with more than 70,000 signatures to parliament calling for the criminalization of verbal sexual harassment.
Female students also carried out exploratory studies in a bid to gauge the scale of the problem — and its impact. Some 40% of the some 3,000 respondents said that they avoided certain places because of catcalling, and 8% reported changing their way of dressing in a 2021 online poll conducted by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN). But there is still a lack of representative official surveys of verbal harassment of women in public spaces.
Global online hate: sexism over critical thinking
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Is legislation the right way to tackle the problem?
Mohamad El-Ghazi, Professor of German and European Criminal Law at the University of Trier, said he wished no one would have to “endure such disgusting comments.” But he added: “Criminal law should be the last resort, not the first.” He told DW that a better way of addressing the problem was by raising awareness of appropriate behavior at home and in schools.
The German Women Lawyers Association (djb) believes the problem can partly be addressed by changing the interpretation of existing German insult laws: “so that forms of verbal sexual harassment that degrade a person to a sex object are understood to be an expression of disregard or disrespect for that person.”
El-Ghazi acknowledges that the country’s top judges have very narrowly defined the crime of insult when dealing with sexist remarks up to now. “The argument has been that the sexually connoted statements do not express disrespect for the individual.”
In 2017, Germany’s Supreme Court in Karlsruhe overturned a case against a 65-year-old man who told an 11-year-old to come with him because he wanted to “touch her pussy,” because it ruled that the remark did not contravene German insult laws nor constitute child sex abuse.
And yet calling someone a “stupid asshole,” “an idiot,” for example, or signaling to someone that you think they’re crazy by tapping your temple with your finger could get you fined in Germany under those laws.
Signaling someone is crazy can land you a fine in Germany, unlike obscene gestures or remarks Image: imago/McPHOTO
US law professor James Whitman says for something to count as an insult in Germany, it must be intended to be insulting. “Coming on to a woman can be — and amazingly has been — interpreted as a sign of respect for her attractiveness,” said the legal expert. It has been read as an intent to compliment rather than offend, according to Whitman.
The Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University told DW that German insult law had grown out of a tradition concerned with the protection of personal honor, with its roots in the law of dueling. That honor was generically male.
Street harassment laws in other European countries
Belgium was the first EU nation to ban sexism in a public space. The law was introduced in 2014. It defines sexism as remarks or actions that suggest inferiority based on gender, reduce “someone to his or her sexual dimension”, or are intended to “express contempt.”
Portugal made verbal sexual abuse an offence in 2016, with offences incurring a fine or prison sentence of up to one year. A similar law was introduced in France two years later. More recently, Spain and the Netherlands followed suit.
In the UK, an act was passed in 2023 to stop sex-based public harassment, but it has still not come into force. That law criminalizes harassment on account of an individual’s sex, including intrusive or persistent staring or questioning, following someone, sexual or obscene comments, propositions or gestures and non-consensual physical contact.
Sonja Eichwede is confident that the SPD will manage to pass a law against verbal sexual harassment this time around. Germany’s justice ministry should have plenty of experience from the country’s European neighbors to draw upon when drafting a bill.
Edited by Rina Goldenberg
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