Incident, Individual, and Campus Factors Associated with Cisgender Men’s Post Sexual Victimization Formal Help Seeking

Purpose: Discussions of campus sexual assault often open with statistics on victimization rates for undergraduate cisgender women, including the oft-cited one in four statistic. While these figures have helped spur interest in campus sexual assault, understanding the experiences of survivors with other gender, sexual, and racial identities is needed to improve campus services and programming. Calls to widen the focus of research have led to exploration of other student’s, including cisgender men’s, victimization. Though cisgender men students experience victimization at lower rates than their cisgender women and gender minority peers, exploring men’s victimization may inform understandings of how campuses can support a wider range of survivors. Further, research is starting to explore how macrosystem factors, such as campus environments, shape experiences related to sexual violence. Therefore, this analysis explored the following research question: How are incident, individual, and campus factors associated with cisgender men’s post-sexual victimization help seeking on college campuses?

Methods: We conducted a secondary data analysis of Spring 2019 American Association of University’s campus climate survey data. Our analytic sample included cisgender men (n=4,474) from 33 campuses who reported sexual victimization (penetration, oral sex, or sexual touching; n=4,674). We created a two-level (level 1: incident- and individual-level, level 2: campus-level) mixed-effects logistic regression model with incident-specific help-seeking as the dependent variable. Incident-level independent variables included perpetrator identity (number, gender), victimization type and tactics, victimization-related consequences, and power-related factors (perpetrator role and relationship with survivor, incident location). Individual-level variables included demographics (race, ethnicity, sexual identity, ability status) and knowledge (misconduct definitions, campus resources, where to report, campus reporting process). Campus-level variables included campus racial, gender, sexual identity, and ethnic diversity.

Results: At the incident-level, cisgender men had higher odds of help seeking when they had a perpetrator who was in a position of power or a current/previous partner, were or thought they were drugged, and had emotional or academic consequences. Cisgender men had decreased help seeking odds when they had more perpetrators, drank voluntarily before their victimization, and when the tactic used was ignoring a lack of consent. At the individual-level having a disability, being gay, or being more knowledgeable about campus services and the reporting process were associated with increased help seeking odds. Queer cisgender men of another race/more than one race had decreased help seeking odds. Increased campus-level racial diversity was associated with increased help seeking odds.

Conclusions: This manuscript sought to be a starting point in 1) understanding how incident and campus contexts shape cisgender men’s post sexual victimization help seeking and 2) attempting to understand the role of power and relational factors in shaping help seeking. While we contend that our findings point to the need for campuses to create intersectional prevention and education programs for all community members (students, faculty, staff), campus sexual assault scholars must continue to attend to the role of masculinity, power, and campus contexts in their work—regardless of focal outcome (e.g., perpetration, victimization, help seeking) or population (e.g., students of color, queer students, students with disabilities).