PhD thesis, University of Otago

There is mounting international evidence—and some limited national evidence—that university students are an at-risk group for experiencing sexual victimisation, compared to their peers and the general population. Establishing the scope of sexual victimisation, and how these experiences impact victimised students, is crucial both for prompting and for informing policy and intervention efforts to ensure the safety of university students. However, in Aotearoa there is little research that has examined the scope of sexual victimisation among university students or its impacts. What research there is has examined women’s experiences, omitting the impacts of sexual victimisation on university men in Aotearoa.

This thesis takes a gender-conscious approach to an empirical study of sexual victimisation at one of the eight universities in Aotearoa. It uses a mixed-methods approach of a survey (N = 2705) and interviews (N = 10), governed by a pragmatic paradigm. It is underpinned by an emotionally-engaged feminist framework.

Quantitative analysis was used to explore the scope of sexual victimisation and shows that more than one-in-three survey participants experienced sexual victimisation. Because the approach was gender-inclusive, the quantitative analysis included experiences that may be more typical for men—specifically being made to penetrate a perpetrator. The most common survey instrument used in this context was originally designed to capture women’s sexual victimisation experiences. The legacy of this focus has meant experiences that may be more typical for men have been excluded. Using a gender-inclusive approach established that women had disproportionately high reports of sexual victimisation, however, a substantial proportion of people identifying as another gender and men also reported experiencing sexual victimisation. The quantitative analysis also suggested that the scoring method of such victimisation surveys may function to underreport sexual victimisation.

The qualitative part of the study examines the way men and women describe the impacts of sexual victimisation experienced while attending an Aotearoa university. Again, the previous studies have focused on women’s experiences and while there have been calls for a more gender-inclusive approach, there has also been resistance to including men’s experiences in studies of sexual victimisation. This study provides a narrative analysis of ten students’ experiences of sexual victimisation, both male and female. The qualitative analysis found that while some impacts of sexual victimisation were experienced by both men and women, gender was salient in influencing the impacts of these experiences. I argue that any study of sexual victimisation must not only be gender-inclusive but also must be attuned to how gender shapes these experiences.

I argue that taken together, the quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrate that campus sexual victimisation as experienced by university students in Aotearoa is a gendered phenomenon and accordingly, responses to campus sexual victimisation must be gender-inclusive but also gender-responsive. (Author's abstract). Record #7538