High school students who endure gender harassment in schools that don’t respond well, enter college and adulthood with potential mental health challenges, according to a University of Oregon study.
The study, published last month in PLOS ONE, found that 97 per cent of women and 96 per cent of men from a pool of 535 undergraduate college students had endured at least one instance of gender harassment during high school.
Experiences of gender harassment, especially for those who encountered it repeatedly, were associated with clinically relevant levels of trauma-related symptoms in college.
“We found that the more gender harassment and institutional betrayal teens encounter in high school, the more mental, physical, and emotional challenges they experience in college,” said lead author Monika N. Lind, a UO psychology doctoral student. “Our findings suggest that…