Peer sexual harassment predicts African American girls’ psychological distress and sexual experimentation

Peer sexual harassment (PSH) occurs frequently and across contexts during adolescence. The current study examined the relations among PSH in school, psychological distress, sexual experimentation, and sexual risk-taking in a sample of African American middle and high school girls. Results indicate that negative body appraisals mediated the relationship between PSH and psychological distress, suggesting that PSH is one way to operationalize interpersonal sexualization and sexual objectification. PSH was directly associated with sexual experimentation, but the association between PSH and sexual experimentation was not mediated by negative body appraisals. Neither PSH nor negative body appraisals were related to sexual risk-taking. This suggests that frequent exposure to high levels of sexualization and sexual objectification, in the form of PSH, is associated with more psychological distress and sexual experimentation, but not with sexual risk-taking, regardless of how girls feel about their bodies.

Dating violence (DV): a systematic meta-analysis review

This study summarizes the results of meta-analyses about risk and protective factors related to dating violence (DV). Fifteen studies were included from 1997 to 2018, N = 1784018. The results were classified according to ecological theory. The Zr’s were calculated for each factor and level of analyses, including the differences between victimization and perpetration effect sizes. According to the level of analysis, results showed that the effect sizes were greater for: (1) individual level: cigarette smoking, adolescent pregnancy (victimization) and sex (perpetration/victimization); (2) microsystem: peer sexual harassment, (victimization), peer DV, deviant peers and family violence (perpetration/ victimization); (3) Exosystem: age (victimization) and violent neighborhoods (perpetration/ victimization), and (4) macrosystem: cultural minority and disadvantaged neighborhoods (perpetration / victimization). DV protective factors which had lowest effect sizes were: parental and peers support; and highest effect sizes were in the exo and macro-level, and then in individual and micro-level. Furthermore, statistically significant differences between total effect sizes were found, being higher to victimization than perpetration. Delimiting the most important risk and protective factors on DV have important implications for prevention and intervention.