Child and Adolescent Exposure to Sexual Harassment: Relationship to Gender, Contact Sexual Abuse, and Adult Psychological Symptoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contrast to adults, there is considerably less research on childhood or adolescent exposure to sexual harassment (CAESH), its lasting psychological correlates, and whether such experiences should be included in definitions of childhood sexual abuse. The current study examined the prevalence and symptomatic sequels of unwanted flirting, being "checked out" sexually, unwanted sexual attention, sexual comments, propositions, and related noncontact behaviors that occurred before age 18, as well as the multivariate relationship between CAESH and contact child sexual abuse (C-CSA) in a diverse online sample of 528 individuals. CAESH was very common, with over 95% of women and 64% of men reporting at least one experience of noncontact sexual harassment before age 18. When childhood sexual abuse was operationalized as the presence of either C-CSA or a total CAESH score of 18 or higher (corresponding to an average score of "3-5 times" prior to age 18), the prevalence was 67% for women and 26% for men, more than three times higher than C-CSA alone. This expanded definition was associated with significantly more anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress relative to C-CSA alone. These results suggest that CAESH is a significant source of symptoms in adults and support the emerging perspective that childhood sexual abuse may be best understood as including both contact and noncontact events.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".