[CliffFletcher]

It's difficult to compare countries and cultures when it comes to sexual assault. In many conservative cultures, women are 'protected' from men by not being allowed out at night, not being allowed to drink alcohol, wearing modest clothing, and they basically have little or no social contact with men outside their family. A woman will get up and move if a men sits beside her on the bus. So sexual assaults by strangers will not be common because society is structured in such a way that there's very little opportunity.

The flipside is that when women are dressed 'indecently,' drinking alcohol, or otherwise behaving in a 'brazen' manner, they're considered open game. Locals will even warn tourists that the allowances given to foreign ways don't extend beyond the tourist beach or hotel. You certainly don't seen teenage girls wearing bathing suits in public or in mixed company in much of Asia or Africa. Pawing at girls isn't even considered sexual assault in much of the world (and let's remember, wasn't considered sexual assault in Canada either until recently).

Canadians are pretty naive about how women are treated elsewhere in the world. We don't have a problem expressing disgust with our own social norms of 30 or 70 years ago, when we think about them at all, but can't seem to bring ourselves to recognize that much of the world still has those attitudes.