Gender Role Norm Conformity and Sexual Assault Risk among Male and Female University Students

ABSTRACT

Scholars have established various risk factors that increase the risk of sexual victimization (SV) among college students. However, little research has focused on gender norm conformity as a risk factor of SV. Addressing this gap in the literature, we conducted a study with 322 men and 815 female university students. Over 51% of women and 23% of men indicated experiencing some form of SV in their lives. Logistic regression analyses revealed various gender differences and established that gender norms predict SV while controlling for established risk factors. We discuss these findings and their implications for prevention measures of SV.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual victimization
• male victims
• alcohol
• drugs
• risky sexual behaviors

Disclosure statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Ghent university is one of the largest (Flemish) universities in Belgium with over 46,000 students.

2. The UN-MENAMAIS project is a Belgian nationally representative study aiming to increase the Understanding, Mechanisms, Nature, Magnitude and Impact of sexual violence in the Belgian population, it’s funded by BELSPO-BRAIN.

3. To ensure comparability of the variable “number of sex partners” between the male and female model, the dummy coding was also applied in the female model. No differences were visible in the resulting best-fitting model, nor in the significance of the predictors.

Additional information

Funding

J.D.’s contribution to this work was supported by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) Ph.D. Fellowship funding scheme under Grant 11G0819N and 11G0821N to J.D.; C.V.’s contribution to this work was supported in part by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) Postdoctoral Fellowship funding scheme under Grant 12C0616N to C.V., 12C0619N to C.V.