Sexual harassment at a Spanish public university: an examination of victims' experiences by gender and campus status

Abstract

[eng] Sexual harassment is increasingly becoming the centre of discussion in contemporary organizations, including university campuses. In this context, sexual harassment means unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, and other verbal, visual, or physical behaviour of a sexual nature, made by someone from or in the educational setting. Our aim is to analyse the prevalence of sexual harassment among employees and university students, and defines their relation to sex and status. We used the EASIS-U, a 38-item questionnaire, with a sample of 1,521 students, and 172 staff members of a Spanish public University. The results obtained show similar sexual harassment prevalence rates that previous surveys carried out in Europe and Spain. As we have hypothesized, university staff has lived more sexual harassment situations than students. But, contrarily to expect, male students have lived more sexual harassment situations than female students. We analyse these results in terms of violence behaviours perceptions.