Abstract
Sexual harassment is commonly considered unwanted sexual attention and a form of gender-based violence that can take physical, verbal and visual forms and it is assumed to cause later depression in adolescents. There is a dearth of research explicitly testing this assumption and the directional pathway remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to use a feminist theoretical framework to test competing models in respect of the direction of the relationships between dimensions of peer sexual harassment victimization and dimensions of depressive symptoms from ages 14 to 16 in adolescents. The study also aimed to investigate gender differences in these pathways. Cross-lagged models were conducted using a three-wave (2010, 2011 and 2012) longitudinal study of 2330 students (51 % females) from Sweden, adjusted for social background. Girls subjected to sexual harassment in grade seven continued to experience sexual harassment the following 2 years. There was weaker evidence of repeated experience of sexual harassment among boys. Depressive symptoms were stable over time in both genders. Sexual name-calling was the dimension that had the strongest associations to all dimensions of depressive symptoms irrespective of gender. In girls, name-calling was associated with later somatic symptoms and negative affect, while anhedonia (reduced ability to experience pleasure) preceded later name-calling. Physical sexual harassment had a reciprocal relationship to somatic symptoms in girls. In boys, name-calling was preceded by all dimensions of depressive symptoms. It is an urgent matter to prevent sexual harassment victimization, as it is most likely to both cause depressive symptoms or a reciprocal cycle of victimization and depression symptoms in girls as well as boys.
Highlights
One of the most urgent public health issues in the majority of Western countries, including Sweden, is poor mental health such as depressive symptoms and psychological distress in adolescence (World Health Organization 2015)
As the current study focuses on victimization and not on perpetration we suggest, in accordance with Conroy (2013), Robinson (2005), and Chambers et al (2004) that a feminist approach that consider sexual harassment as an assertion of male dominance and asymmetric power relations would contribute to the understanding of (a) who is being
Covariates were related to outcome variables in the expected manner. Living with both parents was for the most part inversely related to depressive symptoms and sexual harassment subscales, while having a migrant family background or unemployed parents were positively correlated with both outcomes all these effects were small
Summary
One of the most urgent public health issues in the majority of Western countries, including Sweden, is poor mental health such as depressive symptoms and psychological distress in adolescence (World Health Organization 2015). This has increased substantially over the last three decades (Hagquist 2010; Bremberg 2015; Bor et al 2014; Collishaw et al 2010; Sweeting et al 2009) and the World Health Organization (WHO) states that depression is the worldwide leading cause of illness and disability in adolescents (World Health Organization 2015). Recognizing this gap in our understanding of the directional pathways between sexual harassment and depressive symptoms in adolescents, the current longitudinal study investigates the role of long term sexual harassment victimization in the development of adolescent depressive symptoms
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