Sexualized Aggression in College Drinking Settings: A Four-year Prospective Cohort Study of Undergraduate Women
Creators: name: Papp, Leanna
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: sexualized aggression
subject: sexual violence
subject: sexual assault
subject: sexual harassment
subject: college women
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Women's and Gender Studies
subject: Social Sciences

description: This dissertation explores the newly theorized concept of “sexualized aggression” in U.S. college women’s social drinking spaces (e.g., parties, bars, clubs). I developed the concept of sexualized aggression to refer to understudied and overlooked forms of sexual assault and aggression—more specifically, sexual assault that happens in the absence of aggression and forms of sexual aggression that are not followed by assault. Drawing on data from my four-year, mixed methods study of sexualized aggression with University of Michigan undergraduate women (N = 456), I frame sexualized aggression as a form of “everyday” sexual violence that is normalized and impacts young women’s movements, imaginations, and beliefs about themselves and the world they live in. In Chapter 1, I situate this dissertation and sexualized aggression as a phenomenon within the sexual violence literature, with a particular focus on popular approaches to conceptualizing and measuring sexual assault and harassment among women. Furthermore, I describe the origin and parameters of the longitudinal study that informs this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I analyze data from students’ survey data from the start and end of the study (i.e., data from Fall 2018 and Fall 2021) to interrogate changes in social behavior as a response to sexualized aggression. Approximately 38% of participants at Time 1 (N = 319) and 23% of participants at Time 2 (N = 232) indicated that exposure to sexualized aggression affected their behavior in at least one way (e.g., avoiding fraternity parties). I provide descriptive information about how women modified their behavior in response to sexualized aggression and analyze a total of 208 open-ended responses across both time points. I conclude that young women are engaging in immense labor to avoid, prevent, and cope with sexualized aggression in drinking settings and beyond. In Chapter 3, I seek to understand how undergraduate women make sense of sexualized aggression at the start and end of their college careers. I present findings from a reflexive thematic analysis of interview data from the first and fourth years of the longitudinal study, specifically drawing on responses to the question, “Why do you think these sorts of things [sexualized aggression] happen in parties, bars, and places like that?” I determine that young women draw on theories regarding initiators’ attributes, community and environment norms, and cisheteronormative expectations at a societal level to understand everyday sexual violence. In Chapter 4, I utilize data from the end of the first, second, and third years of the longitudinal study to examine the downstream effects of accepting and experiencing sexualized aggression. I test a model wherein accepting and experiencing sexualized aggression predict personal, then global, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors concerning assault, gender, and sex. Results indicate that accepting sexualized aggression prompts young women to lean into inequitable and harmful ideas about heterosexual intimacy and violence. Further, results support a positive relationship between experiences of sexualized aggression and (solo) sexual assertiveness, which may be reflective of the pressure placed on women to prevent sexual violence through agentic behavior. In Chapter 5, I integrate and expand on the findings of the three studies presented in Chapters 2-4. Finally, I reflect on the insights and challenges of research on sexualized aggression, and I propose several future directions for the research.