Too Common to Count? “Mild” Sexual Assault and Aggression among U.S. College Women

ABSTRACT

National estimates indicate that approximately 1 in 5 women will experience sexual assault during her time in college. However, measures of assault often exclude “mild” experiences, such as incidents of unwanted touching that were not preceded by force, incapacitation, or coercion. We aimed to document the characteristics of “mild” sexual assault and aggression that college women experience at large parties and bars. In addition, we considered women’s descriptions of assaultive and aggressive incidents in the context of campus climate survey items to evaluate the potential for measurement gaps. Across six focus groups (N = 36) at a large, public university in the midwestern U.S., women described routine experiences of “mild” sexual assault and aggression, so common that often only imprecise counts of their frequency (e.g., “all the time”) were possible. Our findings document the many forms and frequencies of “mild” assault and aggression in college women’s lives, as well as the limits of campus climate surveys in measuring the mundane sexual mistreatment of women in campus life. We develop the term “sexualized aggression” to capture such mistreatment and situate this concept within the larger body of research on campus sexual violence.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Abby Stewart and Lilia Cortina for providing feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript and to Kayla Fike, Maira Areguin, Brieann Brown, Rachael Curry, Olivia Drlik, and Riley Marshall for their support and assistance with this research.

Supplementary Data

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Notes

¹ “Greek” and “fraternity” in this article refer to social organizations present on many U.S. university campuses that use Greek letters in their names. Membership in a fraternity (exclusively for men) or sorority (exclusively for women) is an indicator of social status and the Greek system often plays a large role in U.S. universities’ social scenes. The Greek system, and fraternity subcultures in particular, have been identified as contributors to campus sexual violence and rape culture (see Armstrong et al., 2006; Jozkowski & Wiersma-Mosley, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant from the University of Michigan Department of Women’s Studies.