College students appear to be increasingly engaging in casual, non-committed sexual relationships, which may represent potential situations in which sexual assaults occur. The current study sought to assess if college students regard rape as a potential outcome of hooking up through examination of students' rape and hook-up scripts. A multi-ethnic sample of 109 US college women (54% European American, 19% Latina, 21% African American) described a typical rape and bad hook-up. Hook-up scripts generally did not include the possibility of sexual assault and instead focused on psychological consequences (e.g., shame). Participants' rape scripts generally did not occur in the context of casual sexual encounters. Implications of the results for understanding students' sexual behavior and developing rape prevention programs are discussed.
The purpose of the study was to assess sexual assault survivors' nondisclosure motivations, including stigma threat, and their impact on revictimization risk. The authors describe data from a prospective study of 144 female, undergraduate sexual assault survivors, most of whom had been assaulted by acquaintances and only one of whom had officially reported her experience to police. As part of a large-scale investigation, participants described during individual interviews why they had not reported their experiences to law enforcement authorities. Open-ended responses were coded into five reliable content themes, one of which was stigma-motivated nondisclosure, or stigma threat. Results indicated that stigma threat prospectively predicted sexual revictimization during a 4.2-month follow-up period. Moreover, results of mediation analyses suggested that decreased posttraumatic growth during the course of the study accounted for the relationship between stigma threat and survivors' revictimizations. Discussion focuses on advances to the sexual revictimization research (e.g., the importance of assessing subjective/perceptual in addition to objective/factual characteristics of assaults and their social repercussions) and to posttraumatic growth research, with data highlighting for the first time an important health correlate (i.e., sexual revictimization) of sexual assault survivors' perceived (lack of) posttraumatic growth. In addition, recommendations are provided for primary (social-level) prevention as well as for secondary prevention, that is, formal and informal support provided to sexual assault survivors.
INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades there has been a body of research dedicated to the study of juvenile victimization or bullying as it sometimes called. A Scandinavian researcher initiated the earliest studies in this area in response to a rash of teen suicides in the early 1980's (Carney, 2000; Rigby & Slee, 1991). Currently, there has been a growing interest in the dynamics of victimization due to a series of school shootings. Society is demanding answers to why incidents like Columbine, Paducah, and Littleton occurred and what can be accomplished to avoid such violence. Many American researchers are working to provide solutions to these questions and find it difficult to offer prevention in the face of societal acceptance of bullying as a "characterbuilding" experience. Many people believe that bullying is a common part of life to be endured (Weinhold, 2000; Atkin,Smith, Roberto, Fediuk, & Wagner, 2002; Bullock, 2002); however, intimidation, threats, and abuse can have lasting, detrimental effects on the lives of persons involved (Cowie, 1998; Carney, 2000). Scandinavian researcher, Dan Olweus, began the international movement to consider childhood victimization, not as a rite of passage but as malevolent violence in its earliest form (Dennis & Satcher, 1999).
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