Resisting and Persisting through Organizational Exit: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Disclosing Sexual Harassment in Collegiate Debate

Abstract

Collegiate debate has documented extensive problems with sexual harassment. This manuscript uses the first author’s layered account of sexual harassment experienced as a collegiate debater, her transition to a different university, and the management of private information with her family. Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory and a plethora of studies provide a theoretical lens of the first author’s autoethnographic experience. We advance CPM theory by examining how young adult children manage their privacy through constructing more rigid privacy boundaries than their adolescent counterparts and provide the first look at how disclosure can both enable and constrain victims/survivors of sexual harassment, as well as interrogate the way in which survivors can own their experiences and perpetrators be held accountable within the debate community.