In terms of reporting assignments, a soccer game on a sunny Sunday would seem pretty sweet.

But when that assignment popped into CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt’s inbox, her reaction was: “I don’t want to do this.”

She knew that some creep at Sunday’s Toronto FC game would verbally sexually assault her.

It wasn’t a random premonition. It’s been happening, consistently, for more than a year now, she tells me.

Last September Hunt was interviewing Olivia Chow during the mayoral campaign when a pickup truck slowed down and a man unrolled the window and “hurled this disgusting phrase” at them. “I had to explain it to her that this was a stupid trend,” she says.

Then, a couple weeks ago, she was at a school board workshop for Grade 8 boys when a 13-year-old boy yelled the same phrase down the hallway at her.

The irony? The workshop’s theme was “harmony with women and girls.”

If you don’t know what “disgusting phrase” Hunt is referring to, you are lucky. All you need to know is this: it promotes the rape of women.

The “stupid trend” has passing men shouting this into the microphones of mostly female journalists while they are reporting live on television.

It all started on YouTube, of course. John Cain, a Cincinnati filmmaker, uploaded a video he put together of a bearded man in sunglasses and a hoodie disrupting fictional news reports with this vulgar, violent phrase.

Cain later said it was a spoof.

But it was also a business plan. As the trend took off, he’s been busily selling T-shirts emblazoned with “FHRITP,” the acronym for the phrase.

Two female CBC reporters in Montreal wrote about the upsetting trend last year. A Calgary Herald reporter noted how the verbal attacks brought back feelings of “harm, helplessness and violation.”

“In this case,” she wrote, “you’re disrespecting someone who has survived sexual assault.”

For Hunt and her female colleagues at CityNews in Toronto, they’ve suffered the random verbal assaults by passing men “almost every single day on the job, and it’s been going on for almost two years now.”

As a result, she’s cancelled live hits. She’s tried using headsets. She says the station even stopped live feeds altogether during the World Cup last year because it was happening so much.

When she does report live, she finds it harder to focus because she’s on high alert for lurking attackers.

“The surprising thing in all this is the majority of people doing this are grown men — sometimes in their 30s, sometimes in their 40s — and they come from all walks of life. These are men who should know better,” says Hunt, 32. “How has this become socially acceptable?”

On Sunday, Hunt hit her breaking point when it happened to her while reporting from outside BMO Field. Instead of ignoring the men or apologizing to viewers or yelling back a one-liner, all of which she says she’s done in the past, she calmly confronted two huddling nearby, conspicuous by their giant smirks.

They admitted their plans. The one with the Top Gun sunglasses called the phrase “quite substantial.” His friend with the FC scarf said that it was “hilarious” and “amazing,” that Hunt was lucky they didn’t stuff a vibrator in her ear like they do in Britain.

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Their goon friends grinned and leaned back in that manly belly-laugh way. It gave me flashbacks of those terrible frat parties where the price of female admission is degradation.

Not one stopped their friends. Not one passing soccer fan stepped in to support Hunt.

Not that she needed help: she handled the situation flawlessly. Still, the silence that grew around her spoke volumes about this city.

Many men in Toronto find entertainment in verbally raping women.

Another telling thing about the video: Mr. Smirk-in-the-aviators told Hunt the phrase was not meant for her. It was meant for “everyone else.”

In other words, every woman watching the newscast should get the message. We all are fair game.

Smirker No. 2, Shawn Simoes, lost his lucrative job at Hydro One for his part in the interchange. That’s heartening. Hunt says her inbox has been flooded with messages of support — from men thanking her, congratulating her, apologizing to her on behalf of their sex. That’s good too.

What would be better is if those men stepped in before it happened. Tell your friends, colleagues, strangers that verbally raping women isn’t funny and that you won’t accept it.

Join the team of rape culture dismantlers.

MLSE announced Tuesday it would ban fans captured assaulting female reporters with this phrase from attending games for “at least” a year. And it will provide female journalists reporting live from their games with “extra security support.”

Think about that: we live in a city where female reporters need bodyguards to work at soccer games.

Clarification — May 13, 2015: The photo caption on the accompanying picture was edited to clarify which person was heard uttering the vulgarity.