Inside the mind of a groper: I’m a psychologist and this is the REAL reason some men think they can get away with it – and why women often suffer in silence

Two colleagues enter a lift. One is a 24-year-old woman, who’s relatively new to the accountancy firm. The other is a senior member of staff, a seemingly-happily married man of around 40, who she has seen a few times in meetings.

What happens next is so quick, so brazen that it catches my client – now 28 and still working for the company – completely unawares.

‘He looked down from my face, ogled my boobs and then stroked the small area of flesh that was visible from the unbuttoned neckline of my blouse,’ she told me. ‘He touched both breasts and ran his finger along my cleavage.’

The man, whom she described as an overgrown public schoolboy, then looked her straight in the eye, his hand still on her right breast, as he gave an additional squeeze before laughing in her face.

Seconds later, he calmly stepped out of the lift doors, leaving her feeling bewildered, embarrassed and utterly violated.

What a horrible thing for this young woman to experience in the early days of her career! Yet she played the whole thing down, both in her own head and at work. It’s only now, four years later, in the safe space of my consulting room, that she has faced up to the far-reaching ramifications of this violation. Namely the fact she developed intimacy issues and troubling feelings of mistrust.

In the meantime, having climbed several rungs of the ladder, she can foresee a day when she is promoted above the man who demeaned her – but she still cringes every time she sees him.

Hers is a fairly universal female response – of wanting to bury the whole thing and move on alongside wondering: ‘Did I over-react; was any real harm actually done?’

This is exactly what every male groper counts on. It’s how they get away with it. It’s what feeds the sense of entitlement that makes a man think groping is OK.

So much so that unwanted touching is now a regular feature of life in one of Britain’s most unlikely settings – hospitals. A report from Surviving in Scrubs, a campaign group set up in the wake of the #MeToo movement, published last year contains some shocking examples of sexism and sexual assault.

More than 150 doctors, nurses and female healthcare staff contributed stories of being groped, sometimes when they were being scrubbed for an operation, meaning they were ‘unable to use their hands to protect themselves or move away from the perpetrator’.

One woman described how, as a new registrar in a neonatal unit, a senior colleague approached her from behind as she was resuscitating a baby in intensive care: ‘He was pushing his crotch against my bottom. His breathing got heavier…’

When she complained, following a second, similar incident, the matron she spoke to laughed and said: ‘Oh, he does like his blondes!’

Another doctor recalled being asked for a lift to a home visit by a psychiatry registrar when she was a medical student. He put his hand on her thigh and left it there for the entire journey. The doctor said she froze and did not know what to do. On her next placement, a registrar sent her unwanted nude photos.

What comes over loud and clear from these stories is that women are afraid to speak up. One women, who was followed into a store room by a senior colleague who ‘attempted to tear open my uniform and made advances’, did not report him because she was worried a complaint would jeopardise her job.

The most recent government statistics on unwanted sexual touching find it is more common than any other type of sexual assault. According to the Office for National Statistics, 13 per cent of adults aged 16 years and over have experienced this in the years since they turned 16, equivalent to an estimated 6.2million victims. Meanwhile, a 2016 YouGov poll found that over a third of British women have received unwanted physical sexual contact in public.

This might surprise you, but as a behavioural psychologist of 20 years, I now know the motivation behind this kind of violation isn’t sexual. Men who do this – thankfully they are in the minority – rarely get turned on by an uninvited fumble. In fact, inappropriately touching a woman doesn’t provide them with any sort of carnal thrill at all.

If they’re married, they don’t even see it as a betrayal against their partner, because they’ve no desire for the woman they’ve just made a grab at. They don’t recognise that this reflects on them as a husband at all. They don’t expect it to lead to an affair.

No, what this all boils down to is a need to exert power and control. These men might well seem to be decent enough on the face of it; often well-educated, with a nice family behind them, the sort you’d expect to know better.

But gropers are misogynists who see this behaviour as rakish, rather than a form of indecent assault. Getting away with groping makes them feel above the normal rules of decency. They believe think casually jiggling a woman’s breasts is no more sinister than any other example of schoolboy high jinks.

Certainly, if my clients’ experiences are anything to go by, this sort of thing tends mostly to happen in the workplace, or on university campuses, where a female student might fall victim to a male tutor.

So, in places where there is an imbalance of power – and where an inappropriate brush of the hand might get quietly dismissed as some grim rite of passage.

Groping is a Neanderthal way of exerting authority over a woman who, deep down, the perpetrator thinks should be at home raising children and washing dishes. Not snapping at his heels, alongside the young men who might one day get promoted above him.

Grabbing a woman’s bottom or breast – then laughing it off – is their way of saying: ‘You’ve invaded my space, now I’m going to invade yours.’

Women don’t speak out – either at the time, or often even afterwards – both because they are shocked it happened in the first place and because of a deep-seated fear that doing so could end up causing far greater problems for them than for the man in question.

Women tell me they’re scared of being branded troublemakers or finding their chances of promotion or graduating with a good degree have suddenly been thwarted. And all because they misconstrued an ‘accidental’ touch, or simply couldn’t take a joke.

Even today, despite the strides towards female equality, there seems to a certain level of violation we accept because we all experience unsavoury behaviour on the rocky road to success.

The men who do this probably laugh about it with men who feel similarly entitled. They know the fear of complaining will work in their favour – and add to the sense of disempowerment a woman feels – because that is precisely what they were looking to achieve in the first place.

After all, it’s not like a conversation takes place, where the man says ‘I’m going to touch your breasts and you’re going to get a first class degree’ or ‘I’m going to hug you inappropriately and then you’re going to get a great promotion’.

What actually happens is the inverse of that. It’s a male reliance on an implicit fear that if a woman either reports it or makes a fuss about it, that will work against her. Especially when there were only two people in the room at the time and no-one’s screaming rape.

Because, even in 2024, there’s a narrative that says: ‘Come on, was it really as bad as all that?’ We see, read and hear about terrible sexual abuse and violence, meaning there is a part of us – men and woman alike – that says: ‘It was a brushing against a breast, or a grope that didn’t feel comfortable for the person on the receiving end. But no-one got hurt so no real harm was done.’

My client told me that she sometimes wonders whether her groper ever jokes with male colleagues about that encounter. Unfortunately, if he’s the kind of bloke who craves male approval, which gropers tend to be, then I expect he does.

For some men, groping is a way of gaining implicit or explicit approval from their peers, particularly if they come from an all-male public school background.

In those circles there can be a tribal acceptance that this is merely horseplay. Sometimes they are cheered on, which perpetuates the idea that demeaning a woman in this way is acceptable.

Even if peers do disapprove, they’re not going to dob in one of their own.

Meanwhile, if a man had an upbringing where a sense of a vulnerability was created around trying to prove yourself – perhaps due to a very successful father, or at a school where expressing your feelings gets you marked out as weak- this can become a way of nullifying your own vulnerabilities.

It’s a way of saying, I’m strong and I can do what I like. And in some circles, where membership of the so-called boys club means so much, men are admired for not respecting women.

So, what if my client – who’s very good at her job – does eventually become her groper’s boss – will she wreak revenge by grabbing his privates when alone with him? I very much doubt it.

Women don’t tend to grope men, or invade their personal space, because their route to power tends to follow a very different trajectory.

As a successful woman in a position of authority, you’re less likely to have got where you are through any sort of advantage – there’s no female equivalent of the boy’s club; nepotism doesn’t tend to get women very far.

And so, a woman at the top has nothing left to prove. She doesn’t need to demean the people below her in order to feel important.

More than a century ago when the first cinemas opened, women used to go into them armed with hat pins in order to fend off gropers when the lights went out. In these supposedly enlightened times, it’s hard not to wonder whether much has actually changed.

Modern women can’t go into lifts armed with hat pins. We have to go into the spaces we share with men fully expecting to be treated with respect.

Otherwise, unless we are courageous enough to report it, the gropers really do get to have the last laugh – and so the behaviour perpetuates even today.