Footage of women experiencing verbal harassment has been making the rounds for nearly a year, but now there's a new layer being added to the mix — dad reactions.
The Scene, a digital video storytelling network, recorded women walking down the streets of Manhattan and the cameras caught some choice catcalling. Then the women brought their dads into a studio to watch the footage.
We first saw the full video on Vice. The clips are brief and most of the dads look genuinely confused by what's going on. The first dad keeps looking off-camera (to his daughter) asking her if "this just keeps going?"
This father (below) was in favor of retaliation, pointing out that his daughter "wouldn't lose anything" if she had to smack the cat caller with her purse.
According to a national study conducted in 2014 by the Stop Street Harassment organization, 65% of women have experienced street harassment, and 41% of women were subjected to physical harassment like groping or flashing.
And while viewers may have assumed all three fathers would show complete disgust when witnessing their daughters being leered at by random men, the last dad had a peculiar reaction after hearing a man calling his daughter "nice."
"You are very nice. There's no problem there," the father says.
But that dad seems to wrap his head around what's going on when he sees a clip of a man following his daughter for more than three minutes, blowing right past her rejection.
He finds this unacceptable, and proclaims a fistfight would have ensued if he had been there to deal with the harasser.
This video, which has over 300,000 views on YouTube since it was uploaded on August 17, seems to have been created to elicit empathy from men who could see themselves in the fathers' shoes.
But at least a few commenters across various channels where the video has been shared found it problematic to suggest that the way to get a man's empathy is by labeling a women a "daughter, wife, or mother."
This is the top comment on BuzzFeed's post about the video:
Here's the full video below:
