Trump election prompts US mothers to warn children about assault: poll

Mothers in the United States are teaching their children about sexual consent and assault following President-elect Donald Trump's boasts about groping women, according to research published on Tuesday.

Roughly two in five U.S. women think that women are more likely to feel unsafe and men more likely to feel entitled to treat women as sexual objects since Trump was voted into office on Nov. 8, the poll by PerryUndem, a nonpartisan Washington-based research firm, showed.

The Republican billionaire businessman is due to be sworn into office on Friday amid heavy criticism over his attitudes toward women, much of it stemming from a 2005 tape in which he brags about groping women and making unwanted sexual advances.

As a result of his election, 50 percent of women, and 35 percent of men, who are parents, say they are teaching their children about consent or sexual assault issues, the polling showed.

Trump also opposes abortion rights, wants to pull government funding from hundreds of women's health care clinics and repeal a national insurance program that pays for most birth control methods for women.

More than a third of women said they are feeling less tolerant of sexism in their own lives as a result of Trump's victory, the polling said.

Release of the research comes just days before hundreds of thousands of women are expected to flood the nation's capital for a Women's March on Washington on Saturday, designed as a show of unity for women's rights.

Hundreds of sister marches are planned for elsewhere in the United States and around the world.

According to the polling, a majority found Trump's comments on the 2005 tape about grabbing women's genitalia unacceptable and consider the behavior to be sexual assault.

However, among men in the Republican Party, which now controls both houses of the U.S. Congress, two-thirds said they were not upset by the comments.

A third of the Republican men said they think men generally make better political leaders than women do, it found.

PerryUndem surveyed 1,302 adults online and by telephone Dec. 9 through Dec. 27, 2016. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit https://news.trust.org)