Differences between Graduate and Undergraduate Students on Rates of Campus Sexual Violence and Awareness of Sexual Violence

Background: Campus sexual violence (SV) has recently become an area of political focus with increased interest in prevention, often a social work purview. Most campus SV programming and research are targeted at undergraduate students, with little attention paid to graduate students. We examined key measures of SV prevention as well as victimization rates for undergraduate and graduate students in order to determine existing differences between the groups of students.

Methods: This study was conducted as part of a larger campus climate assessment of SV on the campus of a large, public Northeastern university. The study included a census survey measuring SV rates for students, awareness of resources, and measures associated with SV prevention.

The current analysis utilized data from undergraduate and graduate students who were enrolled in the institution at the time the online, anonymous survey was administered in 2014 (N=10,749). Undergraduate students made up 80% of the sample while graduate students made up the remaining 20% of the sample. For undergraduate students, the SV victimization rate was 16% while 10% of graduate students experienced SV while on campus.  

A series of regression models were run comparing undergraduate to graduate students on a number of measures of prevention and on SV victimization. The prevention measures included students’: 1) sense of community; 2) perception of how the university would respond to an incident, such as a crisis or other unspecified incident (university responsiveness); 3) perception of their peers’ response to incidents of SV (student response); 4) awareness of the various university department’s resources; and 5) exposure to information about SV on the campus (level of exposure). Final models included several demographic controls.

Results: The final models for all measures were highly significant (p<.000) with higher mean scores for undergraduate students on all scales but one. The results indicate that undergraduate students have a greater sense of community, perception of other students’ response to an incident of SV, awareness of resources, and exposure to SV prevention messages than graduate students. Conversely, undergraduate students had lower scores for university responsiveness indicating that undergraduates feel more negatively about how the university would respond to a crisis as compared to graduate students. Finally, the results of the logistic regression model for victimization indicated that undergraduate students had two times the odds of experiencing SV while on campus.   

Conclusions and Implications: The results of this study indicate that undergraduate students are at increased risk of victimization compared to graduate students but have higher awareness of resources and overall exposure to information about SV. This indicates that the university might be targeting information about SV, including awareness raising efforts, at undergraduate students disproportionately, neglecting graduate students. Policies and practices regarding campus SV should be inclusive of all students, including graduate students, to ensure equal opportunities and equity in education and awareness for all students. Social workers have a role to play in implementing campus programs that ensure graduate students are made aware of resources and are included in SV prevention efforts.