PSH‐C: A measure of peer sexual harassment among children

Abstract

Peer sexual harassment among adolescents is a widespread problem worldwide, associated with several adverse outcomes. Although retrospective reports indicate that people's first experience of peer sexual harassment occurs before puberty, research in younger ages is still scarce and measures of peer sexual harassment developed for children are lacking. This study explores the possibility of measuring peer sexual harassment in late childhood by evaluating a new scale of developmentally informed items, the Peer Sexual Harassment Scale—Child (PSH‐C), designed to capture peer sexual harassment (i.e., victimization, perpetration, and witnessing) in late childhood (ages 10–12 years) in the school context. Self‐report surveys were distributed to 1007 fourth‐grade students in Sweden (M age = 10.0 years, SD = .3, n = 516 girls). The PSH‐C showed good psychometric properties, supporting the scale's ability to capture peer sexual harassment in late childhood. Exploratory structural equation analyses suggested a two‐factor structure which was confirmed by confirmatory factor analyses: 1) direct verbal sexual aggression, and 2) direct physical sexual harassment, verbal comments and jokes, and visual sexual harassment. The division of the structure contradicts previous studies of adolescents, possibly indicating a difference in the peer sexual harassment construct in relation to development and age.

Special issue introduction: Sexual harassment among young people

“…The first article in the section by Valik et al. (2023) focuses on the methodological issue of measuring sexual harassment among children. Accurate assessment of sexual harassment during the age when sexual harassment starts appearing among young people is foundational to preventing sexual harassment at its onset.…”

What have we learned about sexual harassment among young people? Concluding reflections

“…Through Ringrose and Regehr's (2023) and Kruger et al.’s (2022) studies, which were both designed to elicit adolescents’ own reflections, we are given close access to young people's own views of sexual harassment. Another one of the papers in this special issue provides an innovative contribution with its evaluation of a measure of sexual harassment to be used already in late childhood (Valik et al., 2022), a study that corresponds to the lack of validated measures of sexual harassment as noted by Bolduc and colleagues.…”

Sexual assault and harassment (SAH) victimization disparities between sexual minority and heterosexual Chinese youth

“…First, the life stage‐specific data of this study were collected retrospectively, thus may be subject to potential recall bias (Coughlin, 1990). However, due to ethical considerations, prospective studies on SAH with young‐aged children rarely exist in the literature (Coulter et al., 2017; Sivertsen et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2018), partly because of the lack of developmentally informed measurements (Valik et al., in, press). Thus, the current study provides the best available evidence on the trends of SAH among Chinese youth across the first two decades of their life.…”