Psychological Symptoms Associated with Sexual Victimization Experiences: Differences as a Function of the Type and Number of Sexual Acts and Aggressive Tactics

ABSTRACT

Different types of sexual victimization are associated with different outcomes; for example, on average, physically forced sex is associated with worse psychological outcomes than verbally coerced sex. This study evaluated outcomes associated with sexual victimization as a function of sexual act and aggressive tactic, expanding upon the acts and tactics examined in prior studies. Participants who had experienced sexual victimization (N = 402) completed a survey about their most upsetting victimization experience, identifying the sexual act(s) and aggressive tactic(s) that occurred. They completed measures of PTSD, depression, anger, and trauma-related cognitions. Relationships between symptom severity and most upsetting act and tactic, as well as the number of acts and tactics, were analyzed. Related to the sexual act, non-penetrative sexual acts were associated with the lowest symptom severity on several measures. Related to the aggressive tactic, sex obtained through anger/criticism and physical force were associated with the greatest symptom severity on some measures. A larger number of tactics were associated with more severe symptoms on all measures, whereas number of acts only explained unique variance in PTSD symptom severity. The pattern of severity for outcomes differed from previous conceptualizations, suggesting that current hierarchies of victimization severity may require revision.

Acknowledgment

This project was conducted at the University of Missouri–St. Louis as part of Sara Kern’s doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Zoë Peterson. The authors are grateful to Dr Rachel Wamser-Nanney and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In Messman-Moore et al. (2008), if participants had more than one sexual victimization experience, the researchers placed all participants who had experienced physical force in the physical force category (even if they had also experienced verbal coercion). All participants who had experienced verbal coercion but not physical force were placed in the verbal coercion category. In Ullman et al. (2007), if participants had more than one sexual victimization experience, they were instructed to focus on the event that they perceived as “most serious” (p. 29).

² We also ran all hypothesis-testing analyses with participants excluded if they were missing data on any items within a scale/subscale. The pattern of significant and non-significant results was identical to what we found using mean imputation, with two exceptions: The relationship between type of sexual act and negative thoughts about the self was not significant and the relationship between number of tactics and anger was not significant when we excluded all participants with missing data. However, in both of these cases, the effect sizes for the relationships were identical to the results using mean imputation.