Black adolescents’ perceptions of transgressor, victim, and bystander: Thinking through a sexual harassment dilemma

Abstract

Scant research exists on adolescent thinking about sexual harassment (SH), and even less on Black adolescents’ thinking. We listened to Black students as they thought aloud about a hypothetical SH dilemma. Participants were 7th graders (N = 21, 10 girls, M = 13.2 years, SD = 2.9) who identified as Black or African American. We presented a hypothetical dilemma about a boy who continues to touch a girl despite her request to stop. Participants were asked to take the perspective of each character as well as their own as a bystander. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identified patterns in responses and two themes. Black girls saw the event as a failed social transaction requiring relationship repair. Black boys saw the dilemma as individual risk taking that could result in punishment. We consider these themes within an intersectional framework and compare them to the more familiar gendered framework used in research. Our findings provide insight into how Black adolescents think about SH and suggest entry points for culturally responsive social and emotional learning (SEL) curricula.

What have we learned about sexual harassment among young people? Concluding reflections

“…From this point of view, sexual harassment may thus be used by perpetrators to reinforce this already lower social position. Several of the studies in this special issue investigated the links between minority status (i.e., sexual or ethnic minority status) and sexual harassment (Horn & Poteat, 2022; Kruger et al., 2022; Li et al., 2022; Skoog & Kapetanovic, 2022). In line with previous research, minority status seems to be a risk factor for sexual harassment victimization (McCay et al., 2019).…”

“…Kruger et al. (2022) further illustrated how attitudes toward sexual harassment in a Black U.S. community interacted with both gender and ethnicity, with different expectations on boys versus girls, that in turn could be tied to expectations on Black people in the broader U.S. societal context (e.g., a perceived need to police young Black men).…”

“…Innovative and creative research designs is also a common denominator for several of the studies in this special issue, for example, art‐based methods (Ringrose & Regehr, 2023), the use of vignettes to shed light on adolescents’ perceptions of sexual harassment (Kruger et al., 2022), the analyses of developmental processes both within‐ and between individuals (Skoog & Kapetanovic, 2022), and the merging between school policies and what is reported by students in school (Brown et al., 2022). There were also studies situating sexual harassment within its historical and political contexts in novel ways (Herrera Hernandez & Oswald, 2022; Stein & Taylor, 2022).…”

“…There were also studies situating sexual harassment within its historical and political contexts in novel ways (Herrera Hernandez & Oswald, 2022; Stein & Taylor, 2022). Through Ringrose and Regehr's (2023) and Kruger et al.’s (2022) studies, which were both designed to elicit adolescents’ own reflections, we are given close access to young people's own views of sexual harassment. Another one of the papers in this special issue provides an innovative contribution with its evaluation of a measure of sexual harassment to be used already in late childhood (Valik et al., 2022), a study that corresponds to the lack of validated measures of sexual harassment as noted by Bolduc and colleagues.…”

“…Supporting this approach, Herry and Mulvey (2022) found that participants who were better at perceiving and understanding emotions, were more likely to intervene to defend the victim if witnessing sexual harassment online. Furthermore, from the perspective of the victim, the young girls in Kruger et al.’s (2022) paper stressed the importance of being assertive toward the perpetrator to make the harassment stop. Assertively objecting when being in a vulnerable position of sexual harassment may, however, be difficult.…”