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.
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.