New York: Before her trip to New York a few weeks ago, Lisa Pires, a South African living in Amsterdam, encountered a series of videos on TikTok in which young women had filmed themselves after getting attacked on the street in New York City. Most were punched in the face – unprovoked, at random – in Manhattan south of midtown during the day.

“I remember thinking it sounded so absurd that it couldn’t really have been a thing,” Pires, who comes to the city often, told me recently.

Many others appeared to share her reaction. Women were calling City Council members, wanting to know if the videos were part of a prank, social media having complicated the relationship between the reality of crime and the perception of its prevalence.

The beauty of an accuser all too often breeds suspicion, however prejudicially, especially if the accuser is a TikTok influencer with more than 1 million followers. In this instance, the tousled blonde hair, long nails and laugh-crying on view in one of the most watched videos surely helped sow doubt on a take rendered in a bracing Clueless argot (“literally I fell to the ground and this giant goose egg is forming on my head and I’m like ‘oh, my God’,” Halley McGookin said into her iPhone).

On March 27, the council’s Women’s Caucus issued a statement confirming that reports of these attacks were not a hoax but instead part of “an alarming trend in violence against women”.

Despite her scepticism, Pires made a note to be vigilant when she was in New York. Heading to lunch on a bright and chilly recent afternoon, she was standing at an intersection on Delancey Street waiting for the light to change when she noticed a man, walking in the opposite direction, “studying” her. She registered that he was “quite well dressed,” but almost nothing else made an impression.

Before she knew it, he struck her with his fist on the right side of her head. He fled uptown. She reported the incident to police, who told her that these type of attacks had become “kind of a big deal at the moment”. She was left with swelling in her ear; her face turned black and blue.

What’s provoking all this? Fourteen women have reported getting punched out of nowhere by strangers since mid-March, leaving at least one of them with a broken nose, according to police and city officials. So far there have been two arrests: in each case the assailant was charged with misdemeanor assault, a category in which judges are generally barred from setting bail and one that has risen 13 per cent over the past two years even as major crimes have fallen.

The man arrested in the case of McGookin, a 40-year-old occasional fringe political candidate from Brooklyn named Skiboky Stora, has a criminal record and his own active internet presence, maintaining an Instagram page with provocative images of young women and pictures of himself standing in front of a “Trump: Make America Great Again” sign. He wears a baseball cap with an inscription that claims he is the great-great-grandson of Marcus Garvey.