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POLYVICTIMIZATION AND THE CONTINUUM OF SEXUAL
ABUSE AT ACOLLEGE CAMPUS: DOES NEGATIVE PEER
SUPPORT INCREASE THE LIKELIHOOD OF MULTIPLE
VICTIMIZATIONS?
W S.DK *, M D.S , JN,
NM and AandH-S
Although there is now a large literature on physical and sexual assaults at institutions of higher
education, this article expands that knowledge by looking at Kelly’s continuum of sexual violence
and the concept of polyvictimization. On a campus where 44.9 per cent of the women reported stalk-
ing, and 61.4 per cent reported sexual harassment, this article looks at women who were the victims
of repeated or diverse types of abuse, ranging from obscene phone calls to stalking to harassment
to penetrative sexual assault. Women who suffered multiple abuses are studied using data from
the Campus Quality of Life Survey conducted at a large residential college in the South Atlantic
part of the US. Negative peer support, and especially having friends that are abusive was found to
increase the likelihood of multiple victimization.
Key Words: college, continuum of sexual abuse, polyvictimization, negative peer support
Introduction
Although important gaps in our knowledge remain, the extensive literature that has
developed on violence against women at institutions of higher learning has shown that
these victimizations can take many forms. It is not only completed and attempted pen-
etrative rape that plague campuses but also a wide variety of acts ranging from stalking
to physical violence to unwanted touching to various forms of sexual harassment. This
spectrum has been described in a variety of ways in the literature, from ‘continuum of
violence’ proposed by Kelly (1987, 1988) to ‘web of violence’ proposed by Hamby and
Gr ych (2013), to the notion of polyvictimization (Hamby etal. 2018; Wolfe 2018).
There are differences but what these concepts share is the belief that all of these
injurious behaviours are serious and can have long-term effects on those who experi-
ence them. Behaviours commonly assumed to be ‘minor’ may in fact have major and
long-term consequences. Further, there is a recognition that these intrusions do not
exist in isolation; rather, repeated exposure to them has a cumulative effect. What
these acts have in common is that all are means of ‘abuse, intimidation, coercion, intru-
sion, threat and force’ used mainly in attempts to control women (Kelly 1988,76).
*Walter S.DeKeseredy, Anna Deane Ca rlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Research C enter on Violence, West Virginia
Universit y, Morgantown, W V, USA; Walter.dekeseredy@mail.wvu.edu; Martin D.Schwartz, The George Washington University,
Washing ton, DC , USA; Ja mes Nolan, Resea rch Center on Violence, West Virgi nia University, Morg antown, WV, USA; Nicholas
Mastron, Public Policy and Administration, T he George Washing ton Univer sity, Washington, DC, USA ; Amanda Hall-Sanchez ,
Crim inal Ju stice Progra m, Fair mont Stat e University, Fairmont, WV 26554, USA
doi:10.1093/bjc/azy036 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL
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Operationally, in law and in the work of most researchers, a range of abuses is speci-
ed from rather minor to very major. Typically, physical abuse is measured on a scale of
seriousness from verbal violence or insults to slaps or pushes up to shooting or stabbing.
Sexual assault is measured from the presumably minor unwanted touching in steps
up to penetrative rape. However, in any of the conceptions discussed here, no harm is
automatically considered less hurtful than another. Kelly (1987) explains that women’s
experiences to a continuum of violence ‘shade into and out of a given category such
as sexual harassment, which includes looks, gestures and remarks as well as acts which
may be dened as assault or rape’ (48). The conclusion that Hamby etal. (2018) reach
is that it is a mistake for a researcher or a therapist to react to a single intrusion out of
the broader context. Thus, although it might seem that an individual is overreacting to
a single event that legally is a minor offense, they argue the importance of investigating
the cumulative effect of multiple abuses, harassments and humiliations to understand
properly the full range of reactions by victimized people.
The main objective of this article was to apply these ideas to research on campus
sexual and physical abuse, stalking and sexual harassment, using recent data from the
Campus Quality of Life Survey (CQLS) administered at a large residential university
in the South Atlantic region of the United States. Further, we examine the concept of
negative peer support, which refers to ‘strong support that is hostile to women or is intim-
ate partner violence espousing’ (Hart 2009, 3). In line with rendition of Kelly’s con-
tinuum by Ptacek (2016) , we replace the term violence with abuse because, as he points
out, it better describes the range of victimization experiences than ‘violence’, which
prioritizes physical pain.
The Continuum of Sexual Abuse and Polyvictimization
The claim that behaviours that are commonly considered less serious or even minor
can have life-altering effects is not brand new. As far back as 1916, The Provincetown
(Massachusetts) Players were producing Susan Glaspell’s ‘Tries’ (Glaspell 1920),
which later became famous as the short story ‘A Jury of Her Peers’. This work showed
how, although there was no evidence that she was ever physically harmed or the vic-
tim of any illegal act, Minnie Wright can be seen as a sympathetic character who was
moved to lethal retaliation after her husband took many steps to isolate her and regu-
larly killed her every joy in life. As with our current topic, if one looked at any single
provocation of Mrs Wright, she would seem to have tremendously overreacted. Only by
looking at years of systemic terrorism in her household do her reactions seem coherent,
logical and worthy of sympathy. Similarly, one of the major stimuli to the development
of victimization surveys in the 1960s and 1970s was a concern about fear of crime, and
a wonder at why so many women were afraid of public places out of proportion to their
statistical chances of victimization (Alvi etal. 2001). Although criminologists calculated
the chances of being raped or murdered, local residents were additionally reacting to
a broad variety of dangers, humiliations and terrifying ill treatments in publicareas.
Thus, the vitality of these constructs lies in highlighting the commonalities and
cumulative effect of seemingly distinct abusive behaviours (McGlynn et al. 2017). A s
suggested earlier, typically criminal law, researchers and general ‘common sense’ cre-
ate a hierarchy of abuse that presumes automatically that some forms of physical and
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sexual violence are more problematic and victimizing than others. For example, all
forms of physical abuse and touching are commonly considered to be more serious
than any non-physical forms of victimization. Our concern here is that this obscures
the reality that behaviours such as stalking, cyberstalking, sexual harassment and
some social media attacks are seen by many women as more terrifying than some acts
that the law denes as assaults (Ptacek 2016). Non-physical forms of abuse, especially
sexual harassment, are much more common in many women’s lives than is intimate
partner violence (IPV) (Kelly 2012), with studies showing that catcalls, harassment
and unwanted sexual attention can have important long-term psychological effects
starting even before girls become teenagers (Castillo 2018). It is this common experi-
ence that many theorists have begun to think can partially account for differing reac-
tions of women to victimization. Hamby etal. (2018) argue that to properly understand
women’s responses, it is often necessary to understand a history since childhood of
a wide range of frightening and traumatic experiences. After thousands of studies,
Wolfe (2018, 833)argues, the ‘truth’ seems clear: ‘acts of abuse and violence are rarely
singular, isolated events’.
Although there is an extensive literature on polyvictimization, a concept that simply
means looking at all of the various victimization that one person has suffered, virtually
all of it is concerned with the effect of childhood trauma and victimization on cur-
rently distressed children or adolescents. Even when it is college-aged adults who are
being studied, the concern in the literature is the effect of childhood multiple victimi-
zations on current behaviour. For example, Alexander etal. (2018) recently found that
polyvictimization was the best predictor of what they termed as risky sexual behaviour
among college women, whereas both Holt etal. (2 017) and Espelage etal. (2016) found
childhood polyvictimization related to current psychological functioning among col-
lege students.
However, the exception in this literature is in elder abuse, where Hamby etal. (2016)
recommend that new studies use the polyvictimization concept to develop a broader
understanding of the abused elderly. In other words, it is possible to use polyvictimiza-
tion to study the problems of adults, without reference to early childhood trauma. Such
polyvictimization among adults has been found in the United States (Ramsey-Klawsnik
2017), Portugal (Gil etal. 2015) and China (Ch a n 2017 ).
Thus, our interest in this article was to similarly investigate the phenomenon of
polyvictimization of college women, to see whether some victims suffer from mul-
tiple behaviours located on the continuum of sexual abuse and to try to expand the
understanding of the indignities suffered by college women. We know that on college
campuses (among many other places) women commonly try to avoid going into pub-
lic places alone. It is not only the penetrative assaults and attempts documented in
numerous studies that can cause such behaviour but also the cumulative traumatizing
effect of obscene phone calls, ashing, ‘cat calls’, image-based sexual abuse’ (the public
sharing of private sexual images) and other non-physical abuse. As mentioned earlier,
scholars have often wondered why it is that many women were fearful when they had no
history of major victimization. However, ‘at the time women are being followed/ashed
at/harassed they do not know how the event will end. It is only in retrospect that such
events can be dened as “minor”’ (Kelly and Radford 1987, 242). Of course, all of these
traumatic experiences are added to any experienced physical and sexual violations to
create an individual’s reactions
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Even in intimate relationships, non-physical types of victimization can be just as, if
not more, injurious as physical violence (Adams et al. 2008; DeKeseredy etal. 2018a).
For example, Follingstad et al. (1990) found that 72 per cent of their abused female
interviewees reported that psychological abuse had a more severe effect on them than
did physical abuse. Practitioners regularly hear stories about how bruises, cuts and even
broken bones are not the worst part of being attacked by an intimate partner. After a
time, the external bruises usually heal or go away. The problem for some women, such
as this rural Ohio resident interviewed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2009), is that the
consequences of psychological abuse can last a lifetime:
And years ago, years ago when Istill only had one child, he told me he knew that I wanted out of
the relationship and he said, ‘If Ican’t have you, I’m gonna make it so nobody can have you’. And
Ididn’t understand what he was talking about. A nd it was many, many years later that Irealized he
meant psychologically. He was going to destroy me psychologically so that Iwouldn’t be t to enter
into another relationship. And it’s basically true; Ihave not had any other relationship. I’m afraid to
go into a relationship. Idon’t trust men in general. So basically, Ilive a solitar y life, not by choice, but
because Iam afraid I’m going to end up in a relationship like that again. (84)
Unfortunately, around the world the criminal justice system is concerned mainly with
physical violence. Most people believe in the common sense ancient ‘stitch rule’: violent
crimes involve physical injury, and the level of victimization can be measured by the
level of injury, such as the number of stitches. This approach, however, does not con-
sider the lived realities of many victims. Prioritizing physical harms over experiences
such as the woman quoted earlier diverts attention from the invisible chains of coercive
control that trap women in abusive relationships (Fontes 2015; Ptacek 2016). Coercive
control involves non-physical behaviours that are often subtle, are hard to detect and
prove and seem more forgivable to many people. Its primary objective, however, is to
restrict a woman’s liberties (Tanh a etal. 2010). Common examples are stalking, threat-
ening looks, criticisms and ‘microregulating a partner’s behavior’ (Stark 2007, 229;
Kernsmith 2008).
Kirkwood (1993) describes this as ‘the web of emotional abuse’ (60), where, like a
spider’s web, a number of factors (fear, degradation, objectication, deprivation, over-
burden of responsibility and distortion of subjective reality) are all intertwined so that
the whole is more powerful than the sum of the parts. She reports that ‘the insidious
nature of emotional abuse is that it is experienced as a subtle, nearly invisible process
through which the fundamental components of its impact are ingrained in women’
(6 0 – 61) .
Outside of intimate relationships, the recent #MeToo movement has emphasized a
similar situation. The revelations of #MeToo illustrate how behaviours that may not be
against the criminal law, or are marginally criminal, can destroy women’s careers, self-
condence or promotion prospects (Garber 2018).
In sum, the continuum of sexual abuse and the concept of polyvictimization focus
attention on the cumulative effect of a broad range of highly injurious interrelated
behaviours that women experience, many of which are both exempt from the coverage
or scope of criminal law and simultaneously trivialized or minimized by the general
public and the media (McGlynn etal . 2017). Researchers have devoted extensive energy
to analysing the long-term effects of specic instances of sexual harassment, sexual
violence, stalking, IPV and other harms, or they may analyse repeated patterns of one
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of these, such as violence against a partner. However, for many women, these forms of
abuse ‘seep into one another’ (Ptacek 2016, 128; Wol fe 2018).
There are also safety-related reasons for understanding violence in this manner.
Quite simply, narrow, legalistic denitions of abuse discourage women from seeking
social support. If an abused woman’s male partner’s behaviour does not coincide with
what researchers, criminal justice ofcials, politicians or the public refer to as abuse or
violence, she may be left in a ‘twilight zone’ where she knows that she has been abused
but others do not dene it or categorize it in a way that would allow her to seek help
(Duffy and Momirov 1997; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). As stated by a rural Ohio
sexual assault survivor interviewed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2009), ‘I don’t sit
around and share. Ikeep it to myself…. I’m not one to sit around and talk about what’s
happened’ (49). Worse yet are the women who have been taught what has happened to
them was not abuse. Women who have been told or taught that their victimization is not
a crime are not likely to seek help for what has been termed ‘unacknowledged rape’.
Pitts and Schwartz (1997), for example, found that women who were told that they did
something wrong claimed never to have been raped, but identically situated women
who had the offender blamed did report themselves as rape victims. They point out
that this means that survivors not only must restrict their activities out of fear, but this
reaction takes away their right to be angry aboutit.
In this article, we do not conceptualize victimization in a way that exactly replicates
models used by Kelly (1987) or Ptacek (2016). Just as they did not examine exactly the
same behaviours, our instrument was not designed to collect data on all the abusive
experiences of central interest to each of these scholars. For example, we did not meas-
ure incest, delusional jealousy or reproductive abuse. We do exactly converge with Kelly
by including all types of IPV because, as Kelly (2012) puts it, it ‘shades into and out of’
the other types of abusive behaviours we measured.
Negative Peer Support and SexualAbuse
The other important theoretical position covered in this article is negative peer support,
rooted in DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s male peer support theory, which was originally
developed to try to explain male-to-female sexual assault on college campuses in North
America. Its central argument was that while there are many inuences behind male
sexual aggression in a rape culture, one of the most powerful is the practical and emo-
tional support given by male peers. It is a multifactor theory that includes a variety of
other inuences, such as a familial and courtship patriarchy, that requires males to be
dominant, a narrow conception of both male and female roles, and an almost complete
lack of punishment for male sexual aggression on college campuses.
Male peer support theory has been mainly used to theorize male heterosexual vio-
lence against women. Over the past 30years, most studies in this eld have focused on
what DeKeseredy (1988a) denes as male attachments to male peers and the resources
they provide that perpetuate and legitimate the physical, sexual and psychological vic-
timization of heterosexual women. Research into male peer support theory, as doc-
umented in Schwartz and DeKeseredy (1997) and DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2013),
found that this peer support took two forms: (1) pro-abuse informational support and (2)
attachments to abusive peers. Informational support is the various forms of advice and
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support that legitimates or even requires young men in certain groups to engage in var-
ious forms of abuse of their female friends, intimates and dating partners. Attachments
simply means having friends who themselves engage in abusing women psychologically,
physically or sexually (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1998).
More recently, however, the notion of negative peer support attempts to recognize
that women live in the same culture and are often inuenced by the same cultural fac-
tors. Negative peer support has been adapted for studies of such phenomena as abuse
in a campus LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) com-
munity conducted by DeKeseredy etal. (2017 ) and a study of male and female pro-abuse
peer support for stalking, sexual assault and IPV (DeKeseredy et al. 2018b). Negative
peer support was also found to be associated with image-based sexual abuse and other
technology-facilitated means of abuse, such as social media-based stalking or harass-
ment (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2016). Although much of the abuse of women on col-
lege campuses has been changing in form in recent years, with the invention of new
technologies that can be turned into a weapon of abuse, scholars have found that peer
support remains a major force in such abuse. Indeed, these studies have provided evi-
dence to support the claim that ‘peer support for sexual violence emerges as a particu-
larly challenging and troubling feature of sexual violence in the digital age’ (Powell
and Henry 2017, 5). There has been some support for the claim that behaviours such as
stalking are either learned in peer groups or else such behaviour is facilitated by social
interactions with group members (Fox etal. 2011).
Conspicuously absent from this literature is research on similar support for the sex-
ual harassment and stalking of college women. In fact, studies of any type of stalking on
US campuses are in short supply (Wood etal . 2017) and work on peer support for sexual
harassment has, to date, been limited to high school and middle school settings (Miller
2008; K lein 2012; Agnich etal. 2018). The study reported on here includes measures
of negative peer support and a key goal of this survey was to determine whether two
indicators of this factor—pro-abuse informational support and attachments to abusive
peers—are correlated with stalking and sexual harassment among female college stu-
dents as they are with their physical and sexual assault experiences. This includes both
male and female peers.
Methods
A problem in this eld has been, as Kelly (2012) observed, ‘the underlying argumenta-
tion of the continuum is more difcult to integrate into quantitative research’ (xxi). In
an attempt to overcome this problem, our data are derived from a web questionnaire of
30,470 students attending a South Atlantic US university in spring, 2016. Nearly 20 per
cent of the student population (5,718) completed the CQLS. This self-selected sample
is for the most part representative of the total campus population in terms of race, class
rank and age (Table1). Furthermore, abuse survivors were not more likely to partici-
pate than non-survivors (Pritchard etal., 2018). For this study, we are only using the
responses ofwomen.
E-mail invitations to participate in the survey were sent to all undergraduate, gradu-
ate and professional school students, providing a link to the consent form and the
instrument, which was administered using Qualtrics software. After conrming that
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they were 18 and a current student, participants were informed that all information
given would be anonymous, that their responses could not be tracked and that they
could skip questions or stop taking the survey at anytime.
In addition to the e-mail invitations, a variety of measures were taken to promote
participation, including an electronic message from the University President sent to
all students, advertisements on various university websites, posters hung throughout
T1 Descriptive variable analysis of the campus vs. sample populations
Variables and categories Total sample population Female sample
population
Demographic statistics
Sexual orientation
Heterosexual 4,966 (0 . 9 21) 2,987 (0.924)
Gay/lesbian 147 (0.0 27) 58 (0.018)
Bisexual 194 (0.036) 143 (0. 044)
Asexual 38 (0.007) 22 (0.007)
Other 48 (0.009) 22 (0.007)
N=5,393 N=3,232
Degree program
Undergraduate 4,267 (0.789) 2,545 (0.785)
Graduate 862 (0.159) 534 (0.165)
Professional 278 (0.051) 16 5 (0 . 0 51)
N=5,407 N=3,244
Race/Ethnicity
White 4,529 (0.838) 2,78 4 (0.858)
African-American/Black 240 (0.044) 131 (0.04 0)
Hispanic 168 (0.031) 95 (0.029)
Asian 179 (0. 0 33) 91 (0.02 8)
Native American/Hawaiian/Pacic
Islander
33 (0.006) 15 (0.00 5)
Middle Eastern/South Asian/Indian 145 (0 .027 ) 54 (0.017)
Other (including mixed race) 109 (0.020) 73 (0.023)
N=5,403 N=3,243
Average age
22.1 21.9
N=5,441 N=3,266
Abuses experienced while enrolled
Non-intimate partner stalking
Yes 1,910 (0. 375) 1, 375 (0.449)
No 3,187 (0.625) 1,6 8 4 (0. 551)
N=5,097 N=3,059
Non-intimate partner sexual harassment
Yes 2,33 9 (0.464) 1, 8 6 2 (0.614)
No 2,700 (0. 536) 1,171 (0.386)
N=5,039 N=3,033
Intimate partner violence
Yes 936 (0.187) 551 (0.182)
No 4,080 (0.814) 2,469 (0.818)
N=5,016 N=3,020
Sexual assault and attempted sexual assault
Yes 1,235 (0.252) 995 (0.336)
No 3,661 (0.74 8) 1,965 (0.66 4)
N=4,892 N=2,960
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the campus, encouragement from a variety of campus locations, including resource
centres, athletics ofcials, fraternities and sororities, other student organizations, and
a variety of faculty members making announcements.
In addition, every form of publicity mentioned the opportunity to be randomly
selected to receive one of twenty $50 Visa gift cards. Financial incentives have been
clearly shown to improve the response rate and the quality of responses (James and
Bolstein 1990), and more recently lotteries have been widely used in web surveys to
elicit higher response rates than other forms of incentives (Couper and Bosnjak 2010;
Pedersen and Nielsen 2016). Regardless of whether they elected to continue, all partici-
pants were provided with information on free professional support from counselling
services, which was repeated on every survey page with sensitive questions.
Reminders were sent out each week for 3 weeks after the initial invitation. Although
Couper and Bosnjak (2010) suggest that most of the non-response takes place in the
rst waves, that was less of a problem here, as nearly 2,500 students completed the sur-
vey within 5days of the rst e-mail invitation.
Polyvictimization measures
Four series of questions were created to measure victimization. These questions investi-
gate experiences with sexual assault, stalking, sexual harassment and IPV. These ques-
tions do not necessarily conform to any particular jurisdiction’s legal code, but rather,
as seen in the next section, are carefully tailored from prior research efforts.
Stalking
Stalking is dened here as ‘the willful, repeated, and malicious following, harassing,
or threatening of another person’ (Melton 2007, 4). It was operationalized using the
eight items listed in Table2, which cover many known stalking tactics, including privacy
invasion, cyber harassment and a variety of unwanted unwanted acts, such as privacy
invasion, gifting, surveillance and repeated communications. These items were derived
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and
Sexual Violence Survey (Black etal. 2011) (Cronbach’s alpha=0.74). They were intro-
duced with this question: ‘How many times have one or more people done the follow-
ing things to you since you enrolled at XXX?’ The response categories are ‘None’,
‘1–2’, ‘3–5’, ‘6–8’ and ‘More than 8’. As with other measures, this survey used ordinal
response variables to elicit a better response rate from student participants ( James and
Bolstein 1990).
Sexual harassment
Sexual harassment is ‘unwanted offensive sexual attention’ (Morgan 2008, 661). The
ve items listed in Table2 (Cronbach’s alpha=0.85) are derived from the University
of Kentucky’s Campus Attitudes Toward Safety (C.A.T.S.) survey administered by that
school ’s Center for Research on Violence Against Women (2014). The response catego-
ries are ‘Never (0 times)’, ‘Once (1 time)’, ‘Sometimes (2–5 times)’, ‘Often (6+ times)’
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and ‘Choose not to answer’. These items were introduced as follows: ‘Since you stared
at XXXX, how often has someone (NOT someone you are dating or a spouse/partner)
done any of the following to you?’
Intimate partner violence
The eight items in this measure are derived from the University of Kentucky’s
C.A.T.S. survey (Cronbach’s alpha= 0.83). These introduced with this preamble and
the response categories are ‘Never (0 times)’, ‘Once (1 time)’, ‘Sometimes (2–5 times)’,
‘Often (6+ times)’ and ‘Choose not to answer’:
We are particularly interested in learning about your intimate or romantic relationships. Since you
started at XXX, how many times has someone you were dating or a spouse/partner done the follow-
ing physical thing to you that were NOT done in a joking or playful manner.
T2 Binary descriptive analysis of female student abuse
Variables and categories Yes No
Stalking
Personal surveillance 426 (0.138) 2,650 (0.862)
Direct home, workplace, or school interference 558 (0.182) 2, 515 (0.818)
Leaving strange/threatening items 99 (0.032) 2,974 (0.968)
Home or property invasion 76 (0.025) 2,992 (0.975)
Unwanted communications 855 (0.278) 2,221 (0.722)
Unwarranted gifts 200 (0.065) 2,874 (0.93 5)
Cyberbullying 688 (0.224) 2,383 (0.776)
Online harassment and rumour spreading 472 (0.154) 2, 594 (0.846)
Female stalking victimization 1,375 (0.449) 1,6 8 4 (0. 551)
Sexual harassment
Unwanted sexual comments 1,600 (0.526) 1,440 (0.474)
Non-consensual messages and picture sharing 633 (0.208) 2,4 09 (0.792)
Sexual pressuring for dates and sexual favours 1,081 (0.356) 1,9 58 (0.64 4)
Unwanted gestures and touching 1,022 (0.336) 2,016 (0.664)
Genital exposure 406 (0.134) 2,626 (0.866)
Female sexual harassment victimization 1,862 (0.614) 1,171 (0.386)
Intimate partner violence
Shoving, shaking, pinching, scratching and hair pulling 396 (0.130) 2,654 (0.870)
Slapping 18 6 (0. 0 6 1) 2,860 (0.939)
Throwing objects 234 (0.077) 2,807 (0.923)
Bending ngers and twisting arms 187 (0 .0 61) 2,861 (0.939)
Hitting, punching, kicking and biting 178 (0. 0 58) 2,866 (0.942)
Dragging and throwing partner around 75 (0.025) 2,972 (0.975)
Burning, strangulation and suffocation 96 (0.031) 2,952 (0.969)
Use or threatened use of a weapon 83 (0.027) 2,964 (0.973)
Female intimate partner violence victimization 551 (0.182) 2,4 69 (0.818)
Sexual assault
Non-consensual fondling, kissing and groping 86 0 (0.291) 2,099 (0.709)
Non-consensual oral sex 193 (0.06 5) 2,765 (0.935)
Non-consensual vaginal sex 301 (0.102) 2,652 (0.898)
Non-consensual anal sex 121 (0 .041) 2,831 (0.959)
Attempted non-consensual sex (any type) 465 (0.157) 2,489 (0.843)
Female sexual assault victimization 995 (0. 33 6) 1,9 65 (0.664)
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Sexual assault
The ve items in the sexual assault section of Table2 are modied versions of items in
the Revised Sexual Experiences Survey (Cronbach’s alpha=0.80) of Koss etal. (2007).
Students were asked about unwanted sexual experiences since enrolling at this univer-
sity, with response categories of ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
Negative peer support measures
Peers’ pro-abuse informational support
This type of negative peer support refers to guidance and advice that inuences people
to sexually, physically and psychologically abuse their dating partners (DeKeseredy and
Schwartz 1998). This was measured with seven slightly modied items from those devel-
oped by DeKeseredy (1988b) (Cronbach’s alpha=0.80). These were introduced using a
preamble that includes a statement included in the Administrator-Researcher Campus
Climate Collaborative (ARC3) (2015) survey’s introduction to peer norms measures,
and the participants were asked to answer either ‘yes’ or ‘no’:
The next questions are about the information your current friends may have given you concerning
how to deal with problems in intimate or romantic relationships. When the word date is used, please
think of anyone with whom you have or have had a romantic or sexual relationship—short or long
term. To the best of your knowledge, did any of your friends tell you that …
Attachments to abusivepeers
A slightly modied version of an index developed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998)
was used to operationalize this form of negative peer support. The response categories
were none, 1 or 2, 3–5, 610, more than 10 and don’t know (Cronbach’s alpha=0.81).
To the best of your knowledge, how many of your friends:
• have ever made physically forceful attempts at sexual activity with dates which were
disagreeable and offensive enough that the dates responded in an offended manner
such as crying, ghting, screaming or pleading?
• have ever used physical force, such as hitting or beating, to resolve conicts with their
dates?
• Insult their dates, swear at them and/or withhold affection?
It is unclear how many women in the study received negative peer support from only
men, only women or a combination of both. Analysis of CQLS data by DeKeseredy
etal. (2018a) and a study by Gwartney-Gibbs and Stockard (1989) uncovered evidence
of mixed-sex negative peer support that contributed to female college students’ sexual
victimization. As these researchers discovered, it is also necessary to focus on patri-
archal practices and discourses that occur in mixed-sex college peer groups. Indeed,
some women in such friendship networks may contribute to their male friends’ belief
that their hurtful behaviours and sexist attitudes are acceptable parts of campus life
(Gwartney-Gibbs and Stockard 1989). Some studies in the eld have claimed that
women can be hostilely sexist towards other women (Glick and Fiske 1996; Sibley
etal. 2007). Consider, too, that Schwartz and Pitts (1995) found that college women
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who report having male friends who they know get women drunk or high in order to
have sex with them are themselves more likely to report a sexual assault victimization.
Amajor goal, then, of this study is to determine whether the probability of mixed-sex
negative peer support discovered by earlier studies exists here also.
Data analysis
Before analysis, dichotomous composite variables for sexual assault, IPV, stalking and
sexual harassment were created. A‘1’ was recorded for respondents who indicated that
they had been the victim of any type of behaviour in each respective category, and a ‘0’
was recorded for those who reported no victimization. Similarly, dichotomous compos-
ite variables (0, 1)were created for pro-abuse informational support and attachments
to abusive peers.
Results
Both the continuum of sexual abuse and the concept of polyvictimization suggest that
there are a variety of abusive behaviours that touch many female students’ lives. The
data here support this presumption.
Sexual assault
Since enrolled at this university, 33.6 per cent (n=995) of the women in the sample
experienced one or more of the sexual assaults listed in Table2. This gure is higher
than the frequently stated ‘one in four’ estimate. This is not a measure of penetra-
tive sexual assault (rape), as the most commonly reported event was experiencing
unwanted sexual contact. However, 10 per cent of the women experienced someone
putting their penis, ngers or other objects into their vaginas without their consent.
This behaviour, which is part of the denition of rape in most jurisdictions, is higher
than many other prevalence estimates for completed rape among college students
(Fedina etal. 2016; Richards 2016). It is, however, similar to the 9 per cent rape inci-
dence generated at the same university by the Campus Crime Victimization Survey in
2009 (Weiss 2013). All of these gures are for completed penetrative sexual assault,
but it is important to note that 15.7 per cent of the females in our sample reported
that someone tried to have oral, anal or vaginal sex without their consent, but was
not successful. If one wished to follow the lead of the US government’s ofcial crime
statistic, the Uniform Crime Report, and mix together completed and attempted vagi-
nal, anal and oral penetrative sexual assault, the equivalent gure here would be 25.7
per cent. Of course, this includes students who reported in both categories. The num-
ber of individuals who reported one or more completed or attempted penetrative
sexual assault is 565, or 19.1 per cent of the 2,960 women who completed the sexual
assault survey.
Intimate partner violence
Nearly one in ve (18.2 per cent, n=551) women in the sample reported experiencing
one or more types of IPV. This gure is consistent with estimates uncovered at other
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colleges across the United States (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013; Powers and Kaukinen
2017). Individual violent behaviours were reported at rates from 2.5 per cent to 13 per
cent, with items less commonly associated with physical injury having the higher rates.
Of course, as stated by proponents of the continuum of sexual abuse, the problem with
rank-ordering violent behaviours in a linear fashion is the automatic assumption that
more common behaviours are less likely to result in injuries. Without even taking into
consideration the potential psychological damage from regularly being terrorized with
threats, pushing or shoving, what seems in a survey to be minor may in fact be major.
For instance, a shove can lead to a fall and major head trauma; a slap can break teeth
and draw blood (Smith 1987; Dobash and Dobash 1988; DeKeseredy and Hinch 1991).
Here the extent of injury is not clear, but respondents were explicitly asked to avoid
reporting acts that were done in a joking or playful manner. Further, as explained
earlier, although the law and ‘common sense’ suggest that greater physical trauma as
dened medically is the more serious outcome, many women have insisted that the
psychological strain of polyvictimization or multiple victimization may be more long
lasting and can be experienced as a greater harm.
Stalking
Stalking measures are not common in campus climate surveys (Wood et al . 2017). This
study provides some insight into the extent of some of the most fear-inducing behaviours.
Once again, fear on campus can result from an accumulation of victimizations, even when
none of them involve penetrative sex or serious physical injury. Here, 45 per cent of the
women in the sample experienced at least one of the eight behaviours queried in the survey.
Most of the highest rates of stalking are found in the categories involving technol-
ogy, although there are different levels of sophistication. For example, Navarro (2016)
divides such stalking into low- and high-technology. Low-technology methods do not
require that the stalker obtain particularly sophisticated technological knowledge, and
presumably for that reason the use of such methods is more widespread and common.
Low-technology stalking covered here might include using technology that almost all
students already have (smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops) to send harassing or
threatening electronic messages or mail. Most common is to use social media to leave
unwanted comments online or to spread false rumours. However, a sizeable portion
(13.8 per cent ) of female students were spied upon with a listening device, camera or
global positioning system, which are dened by Navarro (2016) as high-tech methods of
stalking, although it might be noted that basic listening and recording spy devices are
very cheaply and easily available today from sites such as Amazon, hidden in items such
as bottles, mirrors, clocks and radios.
At the same time, non-technology stalking techniques remain common on campus.
Such strategies were known to previous generations, including a stalker showing up
constantly where not wanted (the origin of the word ‘stalking’), or leaving presents,
threatening objects or notes to nd, sometimes accomplished by illegal entry. Here,
the item that asked if a woman had been victimized by a stalker showing up at work or
home was chosen by 558 women, or 18.2 per cent of the sample.
What is particularly interesting is that while traditional non-technology meth-
ods remain popular among stalkers, the newer technological means of stalking were
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experienced by many more students. Given the limited amount of baseline information
from the past, it is difcult to understand whether technology and social media have
expanded the total amount of stalking victimization, or whether traditional stalkers are
now just using newer technologies. Either way, the amount of stalking victimization on
this campus is very high, with 44.9 per cent of the total female sample claiming at least
one of the various forms of stalking victimization.
Sexual harassment
It is not only stalking, however, but also sexual harassment that is rampant at this site.
Amajority (61.4 per cent ) of the respondents experienced one or more of the behav-
iours listed in Table 2, and this estimate parallels those uncovered at other institutions
of higher learning (Agnich etal. 2018). No item was reported by fewer than 13.4 per
cent, and that ‘low’ point was for someone exposing their genitals to a woman. Second,
more than one out of every three female students experienced at least three of the ve
harms and 52.6 per cent (n=1,600) were targeted by someone who made unwanted
sexual comments.
Relating polyvictimization to negative peer support
Pro-abuse information
This type of negative peer support refers to guidance and advice that inuences people
to sexually, physically or psychologically abuse their dating partners (DeKeseredy and
Schwartz 1998). This was measured with an index of seven slightly modied items devel-
oped by DeKeseredy (1988b) that bear a fairly high internal consistency (Cronbach’s
alpha=0.77). Respondents were given ‘yes/no’ options.
Abusive peer attachment
The survey’s three highly related questions (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.81) pertaining to
students’ attachments to abusive friends’ stems from a slightly modied version of
DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998)’s tool to operationalize this form of negative peer
support. These three questions focus on physical, verbal and emotional abusewebs.
Table3 shows how many of those women who reported each of the types of stalk-
ing, IPV or sexual harassment stated that they had been so victimized three or more
times. As sexual assault was measured in this instrument as a yes/no variable, it was not
included in this table. Thus, e.g., of the 688 women who reported incidents of cyber-
bullying, as seen in Table2, 268 (39 per cent) reported more than two victimizations.
Overall, of the 1,375 women who reported any stalking victimization, 768 (55.9 per
cent) reported three or more victimizations. It also shows that 18.8 per cent of the stalk-
ing polyvictimized women reported receiving pro-abuse information. Slightly smaller
numbers of women polyvictimized by harassment (17.5 per cent) and partner violence
(15.9 per cent) were exposed to such information.
Although these numbers are strong enough to support a claim of a relationship, there
is a much stronger tie between polyvictimization survivors and attachment to abusive
peers. Percentages here range from 48.6 per cent for survivors of IPV polyvictimization
to 58.3 per cent for female student survivors of sexual harassment polyvictimization.
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Probit model of polyvictimization
Finally, this study attempts to measure the exposure effect of negative peer support on
polyvictimization likelihoods. By doing a probit analysis, we can see this effect within
our data by constructing a simple model where polyvictimization is dichotomized and
set as the dependent variable against the two independent negative peer support vari-
ables. Probability + Unit (probit) modelling is a form of binary variable analysis that
looks at maximum likelihoods in variable interactions (Bliss 1934). As such, it predicts
odds values, meaning that ratio of the probability that the event will occur to the prob-
ability that it will not occur. As opposed to logistic regression modelling, the primary
benet to probit models is that it uses normal distributions, which is more statistically
relevant with large datasets.
T3 Descriptive analysis of female polyvictimizationa and negative peer supportb
Polyvictimization Pro-abuse
information
Abusive peers
Stalking
Personal surveillance 83 (0.195) — —
Direct home, workplace, or school interference 147 (0.26 3) — —
Leaving strange/threatening items 23 (0.232) — —
Home or property invasion 20 (0.263) — —
Unwanted communications 349 (0.4 08) — —
Unwarranted gifts 49 (0.245) — —
Cyberbullying 268 (0.39 0) — —
Online harassment and rumour spreading 165 (0.350) — —
Female stalking poly victimization summary 768 (0.559) 144 (0.188) 423 ( 0. 551)
Sexual harassment
Unwanted sexual comments 1,130 (0.70 6) — —
Non-consensual messages and picture sharing 374 ( 0. 5 91) — —
Sexual pressuring for dates and sexual favours 665 (0.615) — —
Unwanted gestures and touching 583 (0.570) — —
Genital exposure 155 (0.382) — —
Female sexual harassment victimization summary 1,567 (0.842) 275 (0.175) 913 (0.583)
Intimate partner violence
Shoving, shaking, pinching, scratching and
hair pulling
188 (0.475) — —
Slapping 77 (0.414) — —
Throwing objects 94 (0.4 02) — —
Bending ngers and twisting arms 87 (0.465) — —
Hitting, punching, kicking and biting 75 (0.4 21) — —
Dragging and throwing partner around 31 (0.413) — —
Burning, strangulation and suffocation 36 (0.375) — —
Use or threatened use of a weapon 24 (0.289) — —
Female intimate partner violence victimization
summary
516 (0.936) 82 (0.159) 251 (0.486)
aThe polyvictimization percentages compared to total victimizations in that categor y. The summary shows those
that suffered at least one form of polyvictimizat ion in any category, after removing double-counting students
that suffered multiple victimizations in multiple categories. Finally, the summary gure in parentheses refers to
the percentage of poly vict imized sur vivors compared to all victimized surv ivors in that category.
bThe summary values refer to the poly victimized women who also either received negative informational
support or had abusive peer attachments. Percentages in parentheses polyv ictimized women to all women
victimized in this manner (Table2).
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Here, the polyvictimization variables capture whether female students experienced
more than two of any acts contained within any specic victimization category. The
negative peer support variables were constructed by grouping women who experienced
any form of pro-abuse information or indicated attachment to abusive friends. The one
exception here was the sexual assault variable. Because the questions only asked for yes/
no binary information, the sexual assault variable used here measures polyvictimization
by whether a person answered yes to more than one type of sexual assault (Table4).
The model provides information that advances our understanding of this type of vic-
timization. All coefcients show a statistically signicantly higher likelihood that negative
peer environments will increase the rate of female polyvictimization. By using a large
binary dataset with probit modelling, we ensure that proper statistical practices are met,
providing some support for signicance of the relationship between polyvictimization and
negative peer support. At the same time, however, the pseudo R2 values are relatively low.
Although this might indicate model misspecication, it is more likely that it shows poten-
tial variable omission. Here the pro-abuse information questions used the same language
for both male and female respondents. The low positive rates for women might suggest
that the true impact of such information was hidden. The fact that all of these variables
indicate strong positive relationships to likelihood of women suffering multiple victimiza-
tions should be grounds for future considerations of a campus cultures and contexts.
Discussion
This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the rst quantitative study to apply a modi-
ed version of either a continuum of sexual abuse or a polyvictimization model to the
problem of woman abuse on campus. The ndings from our descriptive analysis show
how widespread polyvictimization is on this campus. These empirical ndings resonate
with how we understand the residual effects of abusing female students at multipletimes.
Although there is a theoretical literature that supports the logical argument that webs
of abuse promulgate more abuse, the empirical nature of this work has mainly been
qualitative, involving in-depth interviews with non-university women. This investigation
has been very valuable to develop rich contextual data. More can be done on campus to
document the manner in which these behaviours ‘blur into and out of each other’ and
function as mechanisms of social control (Phoenix 2012). Qualitative research can do
much to explain that sexually abusive behaviours are common instead of rare and that
the bulk of women’s abusive experiences are not reported to criminal justice ofcials
T4 Probit analysis of female polyvictimization and negative peer support
Variables and categories Pro-abuse
information
Abusive peers Pseudo R2
Female stalking poly victimization 0.464 (0.074)a0.432 (0.058)a0.0432
Female sexual harassment polyvictimization 0.506 (0.073)a0.572 (0.049)a0.0580
Female intimate partner violence polyvictimization 0.294 (0.083)a399 (0.067)a0.0301
Female sexual assault polyvictimizationa0.474 (0.071)a0.623 (0.052)a0.0649
as=0.000.
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and other service providers (Walklate and Brown 2012). Support for this perception
claim might come from an additional CQLS question, where 75 per cent of all students
either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘The institution tolerates a culture
of sexual misconduct’.
However, this unique datasetallows for us to contribute quantitatively to the research
by gauging the degree to which women report such behaviours on a university campus.
Another of this study’s ndings is that not only can we document that there is very
extensive polyvictimization on this campus but also that it is related to negative peer
support. The presence of negative peer support, and especially attachment to abusive
peers, makes it more likely that multiple or polyvictimization will occur. Nearly 30years
ago, Gwartney-Gibbs and Stockard (1989) stated, ‘[S]exual aggression and victimiza-
tion may be a part of peer group culture. That is, the friendship networks from which
individuals draw … their partners may allow, or even encourage male aggression and
female victimization in different degrees’ (185). Now, it appears that sexual harassment
and stalking may also be part of a peer culture.
Of course there are still tremendous gaps in our knowledge on this subject. Besides
additional empirical work, in-depth interviews with college women are needed to under-
stand the impact of repeated victimizations on women. Another understudied area is
empirical data on whether the concepts discussed in this article are relevant specically
to the lives of LGBTQ college students.
This study provided evidence that researchers should focus on practices and dis-
courses that occur in mixed-sex college peer groups. There is extensive evidence over
decades that male peers provide support for abusive behaviour (DeKeseredy and
Schwartz 2013). However, there is more limited evidence that toxic mixed-sex networks
may contribute to normalizing as part of regular college life a pattern of male hurtful
behaviours and sexist attitudes (Gwartney-Gibbs and Stockard 1989). Of course, women
can demonstrate sexism towards other women (Glick and Fiske 1996; Sibley etal. 2007),
or they might maintain friendships with sexually aggressive men, giving tacit support.
Schwartz and Pitts (1995), e.g., found that college women who are sexually assaulted are
more likely than others to have male friends who they know get women drunk or high
to have sex withthem.
Most important of all are the responses by universities to this information (Richards
2016). After many years of developing campus programming, these responses remain
widely varied (Wooten and Mitchell 2016), although under federal pressure many
schools have implemented bystander programmes (DeKeseredy 2017). Of course, with
most victimizations taking place in private, it is unlikely that bystander intervention will
solve this problem (Hewitt and Beauregard 2014; Henriksen etal. 2016). Still, ndings
like those in this study show that campus victimization remains very high, suggesting
that additional approaches are needed to chip away at campus climates that legitimate
and support the victimization of women.
A
The authors would like to thank Dottie M. Hays-Barzizza, Joseph F. Donnermeyer,
William F.Flack Jr, Marianne Hester, Peter Kraska, Adam Pritchard, James Ptacek,
Callie Rennison and Claire Renzetti for their assistance.
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