Losing Confidence and Networks as an Impact of Staff/Faculty-Student Sexual Harassment: Quantitative Findings From the UK

Abstract

Sexual misconduct perpetrated by faculty/staff in higher education can have severe and long-lasting impacts. This study reports on a survey of 1,768 current and former students in U.K. higher education carried out in 2018, of whom 734 had experienced at least one incident of sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct was measured by questions on sexual conduct from faculty/staff that aimed to establish whether a sexualized environment existed rather than asking whether behaviors were unwanted. Within this sample, 734 had experienced a sexualized environment from faculty/staff. They were asked to self-assess the impacts this had on them, and 34% reported that they had been negatively impacted by this conduct. The most common impacts were loss of self-confidence; mental health problems; professional relations being damaged; loss of confidence in academic work; and avoiding parts of campus, each experienced by 14% to 18% of this sample. Items that measured academic disengagement such as missing contact hours or dropping/changing a module were also impactful for a minority of respondents, in line with existing literature. The article discusses two impacts that are underexplored in previous research on sexual misconduct in academia: the ability to network; and self-confidence. First, our study indicates that there are significant impacts of sexual misconduct on students’ ability to network and build professional relationships. However, existing studies on this topic have not discussed sexual misconduct as a barrier to networking. Second, the study reveals that, among this sample, loss of confidence was the most common impact of being subjected to sexual misconduct. This supports Gill and Orgad’s theorization of the “confidence culture,” a trend among popular and corporate gender equality discourses that exhorts women to develop their confidence, obscuring the structural reasons for women’s lower confidence; our findings show that sexual misconduct is one of these reasons.