Questionnaire suggests advice to college rape victims is biased by gender
With the addition of the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, University of South Dakota Associate Professor Yumi Suzuki is stirring interest in sexual assault on campus with research she is pursuing at the university.
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Suzuki sent out a survey questionnaire to undergraduates in late September “designed to measure young people’s beliefs about rape and their attitudes toward formal support providers.”
Email surveys typically have a 10 to 20 percent response Suzuki said, with a total of 415 undergraduate students responded to her survey from a variety of majors.
The raw data reported that of 406 people who responded, slightly over 5 percent said they have been a victim of rape since coming to this university. At least 70 percent of the pool of students in the survey was female.
Another significant piece of data, Suzuki said, was of 407 students respondents, 17.2 percent said they know somebody who has been sexually assaulted since they arrived at the university.
As Suzuki’s research has been approved for journal publication, this is not her first work with the subject matter of sexual assault on a college campus. While working on her dissertation at the State University of New York, Suzuki performed similar research with a sample of SUNY undergraduate students.
The SUNY results suggested students were more in favor of turning to the police than medical professionals when met with different depictions of rape.
Another unexpected finding, she said, was how male college students more likely recommended rape victims seek help from law enforcement, while female college students were more likely to recommend the victim to health and mental health professionals.
But reporting one’s sexual assault is a major hurdle on a college campus, as a 2000 National Institute of Justice study found that less than 5 percent of rape/sexual assaults are disclosed to officials.
One effective first step to reporting sexual assault though can be self-accknowledgment, Suzuki said.
“College is a very new environment, (students) have more freedom, and there is no parental supervision,” she said. “If (sexual assault) happens, (sometimes students) don’t think this is a crime because they think ‘Maybe I led this on, maybe I miscommunicated, maybe I will be excluded from a student group if I report it.’ ”
Suzuki said because of the impact of gender on the nature of advice suggested in her research, the university could attempt to pursue peer education training to incorporate the social, health, legal and psychological consequences of sexual assault. The impact, she said, could mean men and women would be exposed to a wider range of rape victimization.
