Sexual harassment victimization and perpetration among high school students

Background: This is the first large population-based study to examine prevalence rates of sexual harassment occurring during the past 12 months by victimization and perpetration among high school students. Rates of sexual harassment by tactic, direction and sex are reported including the co-occurrence of victimization and perpetration in the past 12 months. This research fills an important gap in the existing research by providing estimates of the frequency of sexual harassment victimization and perpetration among adolescents and by sex and other demographic and violence risk factors.

Methods: In this large cross-sectional survey of students attending 26 high schools in Kentucky, sexual harassment was defined using three questions from the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the three sexual harassment items indicate reasonable internal consistency for victimization (á=.66) and perpetration (á=.71).

Results: Among 18,090 students who completed a 95 item anonymous survey during January-May 2010, 30% disclosed sexual harassment victimization (37% of females, 21% of males) and 8.5% reported perpetration (5% of females, 12% of males). While sexual harassment victimization rates were higher among females (37.1%) than males (21.4%), the inverse pattern was observed for perpetration by sex (females 5.1%; males 12.4%).

Conclusions: Sexual harassment perpetration was highly correlated with male sex, minority race /ethnicity, same sex attraction, bullying, binge drinking, and intraparental partner violence. Females were more likely to self-disclose sexual harassment victimization and males were more likely to self report sexual harassment perpetration.