Good question Stuart. That kind of stuff is always a challenge. It happens in Norway too but not at the scale or frequency I see in the US. There are a couple of reasons for this.

I would relate the first reason to my personal observations from having lived in the US and studied at college there as well as what I have heard Norwegian girls who have studied here have told me.

North America is a lot more of gender divided country with more macho culture from what I can tell. American men are expected to take initiative, lead and be a bit cooky and overconfident. I cannot speak for the US today, but when I studied there around 20 years ago I found it at times shockingly misogynist. The way I saw guys treat women at bars sometimes kind of blew my mind. Not in a good way. I was mildly in shock by how such male behavior got tolerated. Stuff I saw there would have gotten a guy beat up in Norway.

I remember friends in college how they talked about women in a kind of degrading manner. One has to keep in mind that I come from a blue collar town in Norway and spend a lot of my young years partying with the kind of guys I wrote about here who ended up working with machines and heavy equipment. It is weird when they spoke about women in more respectful terms than American college kids.

I had an aweful experience at a frathouse party once. I saw how a girl was at risk getting raped and as a foreigner I had no idea how to tackle it. You don't have a lot of confidence in taking action in a foreign culture. You try to blend in and stay out of trouble. But right there I was seeing that I might have to actually step up or see a girl getting abused. Thankfully she managed to getherself out of it. I was just there for a year, and yet I saw so many more shady situations than all my years in Norway or the Netherlands.

Part of the problem I think is that the US practices stricter gender segregation. At my doorm it was all boys. I think that lets toxic masculinity develop worse. I saw that when I served in the armed forces in Norway myself.

The solution the Norwegian military has used is to mix genders. Men and women share rooms in the Norwegian military. Yes, that may sound shocking and counterintuitive if you want to avoid rape.

The research we have done on this however seems to suggest that the opposite happens. A mixed gender environment hinders toxic masculinity from developing to the same extent. Guys learn to behave better since they are around women more. Because they are so close men and women develop more of a sister and brother type of relation to each other.

I think all violence and abuse in many ways comes down to dehumanization. The more you can turn the one you hurt into an alien. Somebody you don't know, the easier it is to hurt them. The mental barrier becomes higher once you are dealing with somebody you know very well. Not to mention that women will develop allies among other men who can step up if one guy gets out of line. Brothers and sisters look after each other after all.

Just a last remark: I don't want to give the horrible impression that all American men are sexist or don't respect women. That is certainly not my experience. It is more a case of prevalence and these experiences I have had were in primarily conservative states. I suspect there would be different attitutdes in more liberal coastal states.

One also has to consider that Norway were I grew up is a bit of an outlier. Feminism has been a very strong force here for many years. Thus it may not be the US is a strange outlier. It may simply be that feminist inspired ideology is more dominant here.