Comparative Analysis of Sexual Violence Victimization and Risks between College Students in United States and China

• In Event: 084 - Student Forum Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Student Forum Roundtable Session. Table 01. Gender and Self

Abstract

Based on Sexual Violence Victimization Survey (SVVS) of random sample (N= 560) of college students from China and the comparable survey data of sample of college students in United States collected in a previous study (Fisher et al. 1999), I examined the difference of extent and nature of sexual violence and the associated reporting patterns among college students between two countries. This study follows the concerns addressed in the national-level analysis of sexual victimization of college women study (Fisher et al, 1999), but added a few more insights. First, this study looks at both male victims and female victims. Second, and most importantly, this study compares the cross-ethnicity difference between students from the two countries. This study complements the ignorance of previous comparative analysis studies by only comparing among Western countries (Fisher et al, 2003). Guided by routine activity theories, my comparative results from logit models predicting the likelihood of being a victim of sexual violence reveal that there are more differences than similarities as to which variables have significant impact over the probability of being victimized in each country respectively. Finally, I found that reporting rate of sexual violence in China is also significantly lower, and the reasons for non-reporting between student samples from the two countries are different.

Author

• Zhihang Dong, Pennsylvania State University