On Saturday, France celebrated the Fête de la Musique – an annual street festival of free live music held across the country. But the headlines were about something else: panic over ”needle spiking” – a fear that men secretly injected drugs in women in crowded spaces.

Social media posts and videos warned women to watch their backs. News outlets picked it up, and the panic spread fast. Then came the numbers: French authorities reported that 145 people said they had felt a prick during the festivities, which attracted more than ten million people. So far, there is no indication that any substances were found in the victims' systems, or even that syringes were used.

So what's really going on? Criminologists have described the rise in needle-spiking reports in recent years as a form of ”mass hysteria” driven more by fear than by confirmed incidents. Drug screenings are almost always negative, and while arrests do happen – including 12 people last weekend in France – the gap between reported cases and proven assaults remains huge.

Still, that doesn't mean the reports are fake or made up. Many women experience symptoms like dizziness or the sensation of being pricked – and those feelings are often real. In some cases, they may have been caused by something else (a sharp object, an insect), but it's the climate of fear that leads them to interpret it as a needle attack, experts believe.

That fear does not come in a vacuum. For many women, being in public means constantly staying alert, adjusting their behaviour, and taking responsibility for their own safety. That pressure acts as a form of social control, making it seem like it's their fault if something goes wrong, while the real issue, misogyny, goes unaddressed.