Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
A six-year follow-up of Swedish pupils traces peer sexual harassment back to Grade 4
Aziz-Kaan Donmez followed the same children annually from Grades 4 to 9 and found reported victimization climbing until Grade 7, with boys affected as often as girls and no clean line between those who harass and those harassed.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- A University of Gothenburg doctoral thesis by Aziz-Kaan Donmez finds peer sexual harassment among Swedish pupils begins as early as Grade 4 and continues throughout lower secondary school.
- One study followed the same pupils annually from Grades 4 to 9, and the share reporting some form of victimization rose from Grade 4 to Grade 7 and then stayed level.
- Boys in the study reported being harassed as often as girls did, in the middle school years and in the later ones.
- Pupils who had been harassed online or in person reported higher anxiety and were more likely to restrict where they went in order to feel safe.
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Why it matters
- constraint Prevention that starts in lower secondary school arrives after the three grades in which reported victimization was still climbing, so it acts on a prevalence that is already established.
- decision Schools that accept Donmez's recommendation have to commission material written for pupils below Grade 4, an age band most existing harassment curricula were not designed for.
- exposure A program that treats girls as the targets and boys as the source misses half its reporting population, and the settings that track with anxiety differ by sex.
- constraint The overlap between harassing and being harassed is a correlation. A prevention model built on victimization leading to later harassing needs the sequence, and co-occurrence is what these data establish.
Self-report is the whole instrument here, and it sets the limit on what a trajectory can mean. Pupils were asked about unwanted and offensive sexualized behaviour: sexual advances and comments, unwanted touching, exposure to sexually explicit images [11]. A child in Grade 4 and the same child in Grade 7 will not necessarily draw that line in the same place, so a rising curve can mean more behaviour, better recognition of it, or both. The University of Gothenburg release does not report sample sizes or whether the questionnaire was checked for equivalence across grades [19]. Dönmez defends the thesis, titled "Unpacking Peer Sexual Harassment: Roles, Trajectories, and Contexts from Childhood to Adolescence", on October 2 [2][3].
The timing argument depends on where the curve flattens. The reported increase covers Grades 4 to 7, three annual steps, and the plateau covers Grades 7 to 9, two more [6][20]. A program whose first lesson lands in lower secondary school begins after that increase has finished, and works on the level it inherits [6].
The most consequential finding for program design is about classification. "Those who reported sexually harassing others had often also experienced harassment themselves and witnessed others being harassed. It was therefore not possible to identify clearly distinct groups of perpetrators, victims and witnesses," Dönmez said [8]. A curriculum that sorts a class into children who need protecting and children who need correcting is sorting on a division that did not appear in these data. Whether victimization comes before harassing others is a different question from whether the two co-occur, and co-occurrence is what was measured [9].
The anxiety associations split by setting. School-based harassment went with higher anxiety among girls; online harassment went with higher anxiety among boys [16]. Pupils who perceived their own pubertal development as either earlier or later than their peers' reported more frequent victimization [14]. Peer social support and a more positive view of their own appearance went with less victimization [15]. These are associations measured alongside each other in a school population, not demonstrated causes.
"School-based interventions need to be introduced before Grade 4 and take into account that boys are just as likely as girls to experience sexual harassment," Dönmez said [17]. He also put his contribution in terms of the existing picture: "Peer sexual harassment among children and adolescents has previously been described in a rather one-sided and simplified way, and my thesis helps provide a more nuanced picture," he said [18].
The base rate the thesis works against comes from earlier research, where roughly half of children and adolescents report having experienced unwanted and offensive sexualized behaviour from peers [10]. Those who report it also report more anxiety, more depressive symptoms and higher school absence [12].
What to watch
- Whether the defended thesis reports the order of events between being harassed and harassing others. A victim-to-perpetrator prevention model would need that sequence.
- Whether the thesis tests that its questionnaire measures the same thing at Grade 4 as at Grade 9, and reports grade-by-grade percentages.
- Whether any Swedish school program moves harassment content below Grade 4 in response to the recommendation.