“What you would expect is that in a country with high gender equality, you would see lower victimisation rates,” Rannveig Sigurvinsdóttir, an associate professor of psychology at Reykjavik University who was not involved with the study, told Euronews Health.
The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, surveyed about 28,200 women ages 18 to 69 in Iceland, asking whether they had experienced 23 “life stressors” such as stillbirth, having a child taken away, divorce, or discrimination and humiliation.
Two in thre women said they had either witnessed or were a direct victim of unwanted sexual experiences, making it the most common life stressor followed by life-threatening illness or injuries (58.1 per cent), and accidents, fires, or explosions (51.1 per cent).
The researchers behind the study at the University of Iceland also assessed the respondents’ PTSD symptoms and found that overall, 15.9 per cent of women had probable PTSD.
Women who had been sexually assaulted or held captive were more likely to have probable PTSD than women who experienced any other life stressor, including having a child taken away, a sudden violent death, or experiencing a natural disaster.
Sexual violence was more traumatic for women who were first attacked when they were younger than 12 years old and for those who were assaulted by a partner or relative, such as a parent, the study found.
“We found a substantial proportion of women who experienced PTSD decades after the last assault, lending support to the chronicity of PTSD after exposure to such trauma,” the study authors said.
Taken together, the results call Iceland’s reputation for gender equality into question, but it isn’t the only high-income Nordic country to have a problem with this kind of violence.
Finland, Denmark, and Sweden all report higher lifetime levels of sexual or physical assault compared with the rest of Europe, the study noted.