There is a growing body of literature on the rise of gender-based violence in politics across democratic polities (Bardall 2013; Collignon and Rüdig 2020; Erikson et al. 2021; Krook 2020). This research has helped identify the forms, frequency, and intensity of harassment in politics, and its effects on politicians, voters, and democracy. This literature confirms that gender-based violence in politics is pervasive and motivated by a desire to keep women and other perceived “space invaders” (Puwar 2004) out of politics. Despite widespread evidence of a problem, responses to gender-based violence in politics have been muted (Raney et al. 2025). Observers have noted a tendency to understand violence as the “cost of doing politics” and argue that the “violence of silence” is one reason gender-based violence in politics persists (Krook 2017). Our paper extends this insight to assess how the problem of gender-based violence in politics is understood. We show that both the public and politicians under-estimate the pervasiveness, seriousness, and impact of gender-based violence in politics. The paper’s evidence draws on two main sources; first, a survey of more than 1,600 municipal officeholders in Canada and, second, a public opinion survey of Canadians. Most research on gender-based violence in politics concentrates on the national or state level, and this paper contributes to our understanding of violence at a level of office commonly thought to be a “kinder, gentler” form of politics (Tolley et al. 2022). Our survey shows that almost two-thirds of municipal officeholders have experienced some form of violence in politics, and about 45% say it has negatively affected their well-being and ability to do their job. Despite the frequency of violence in local politics, we find only small proportions of the public and municipal officeholders say it is a big problem. We argue that this perception gap is one explanation for the lack of concerted action to address gender-based violence in politics.
