Empathy deficits and perceived permissive environments: sexual harassment perpetration on college campuses

ABSTRACT

Sexual harassment is a common experience among college students, and its perpetration may be associated with deficits in perspective taking – a form of empathy – and institutional factors such as climates. This investigation compared reported outcomes after sexual harassment and perceptions of institutional support between perpetrators and victims of sexual harassment. A total of 579 students responding to a campus climate survey indicated that they were victims or perpetrators of sexual harassment in the past seven months. Perpetrators of sexual harassment perceived that their victims experienced far fewer negative outcomes than victims reported actually experiencing. Additionally, victims of sexual harassment had significantly worse perceptions of institutional support than did perpetrators of sexual harassment. This information can be used to inform primary and secondary prevention methods utilised by universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual harassment
• perpetration
• victimisation
• empathy
• institutional support

Acknowledgements

REDCap

Study data were collected and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at the University of Kentucky. The project described was supported by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through grant number UL1TR001998. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Because this item relates more to severe homophobic abuse rather than sexual harassment, we considered dropping this single item and using a 4-item version of sexual harassment inventory. However, in examining participant responses, we found that no participant reported perpetrating or being victimised by homophobic abuse solely. Therefore, dropping this item would not change the sample size.

Additional information

Funding

Research was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [grant number U01CE002668]. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a supervisory role in the design and conduct of the study but had no direct role in the collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data; the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publications. The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.