Reviewer’s report
Title: 
Prevalence and correlates of sexual violence among adolescent girls and
young women: findings from a cross-sectional study in a South African
university
Version: 
1 
Date: 
28 Jun 2021
Reviewer's report:
Thank you to the authors for implemented the requested changes. This article
provides important data about sexual violence prevalence in a university
population in South Africa and should be published. I have included some edits
that I suggest would be helpful to the reader, for your consideration:
P 4 line 1. 'South Africa is faced with an exceedingly high rate of sexual
violence [26].' Can you put the rate here, and how it compares to other countries
or regions?
Page 9 line 1 'The observed prevalence in this study is higher than the global
prevalence of 7.2% [38] and a prevalence of 17.4% in Southern Africa [38].' Do
these other data sources refer to young people? Are they comparable to your
data? Then a few lines down you write 'Our reported prevalence is also higher
than those reported elsewhere, such as in a study in Norway [40] and
Nigeria[41].' How is that different to the data you mentioned above with citation
38? Are you making different points with those two sentences or for both
sentences are you saying that the prevalence you found is higher than data
elsewhere? If so, you could combine the statements. 
In your discussion, there is a lost opportunity to frame your findings in terms of
the social ecological model of violence against women or IPV. You describe
predictors of violence including poverty, normative behaviour around drinking,
and religion- and as such you are addressing multiple levels of the social
ecological model. As such your findings are consistent with socioecological
approaches to violence prevention, which I think is worth mentioning somewhere
in the discussion as this conceptualizations of VAW/IPV ties in with the global
literature, and also helps bring the discourse away from blaming the individual
to instead being aware of and intervening on structural factors that contribute to
sexual violence. 
In the paragraph beginning on page 10 line 29, you found that 2/5 of survivors
did not mention the incident to anyone. That means that 60% DID mention it. It
strikes me that this finding is worth reframing in a positive light - rather than just
saying that 2/5 did not, you can emphasise that more than half of respondents did
mention their experience of sexual violence to someone else - which works
against the notion that no one talks about it. Of course, there remain many
challenges to reporting as you mention… 
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