Unequal Vulnerability: International Graduate Students’ Precarity in Reporting Sexual Harassment

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 5) Gendered Violence, Risk, and Vulnerability

Abstract

Graduate students are at a particularly high risk of being sexually harassed (SH) due to their structural location in the university and being supervised closely by faculty members, who may end up being the harassers. Yet, not all graduate students are equally vulnerable. International graduate students are the most vulnerable to SH. In addition to the structural issues that make graduate students more likely than others to experience SH, international students face legal restrictions on student visas, making them dependent on both employment and being a student. We designed a survey to study graduate student experience with reporting sexual harassment by intentionally sampling departments with a high proportions of international students at a large research institution. Through a mixed-methods approach, our findings suggest that international students express more trust in the university’s ability to properly address SH than domestic students. International students pointed to the Title IX office and university policies as explaining their trust, while domestic students felt that the university tends to sweep SH reports under the rug. However, when it comes to actually reporting SH, international students have unique hesitations related to their visa statuses as well as cultural and language barriers. While international graduate students had more concerns regarding themselves and their futures, domestic students’ reasons for not reporting concerned the impact on others as well as their ability to handle the situation on their own. With the rapidly expanding legal restrictions on student visas, addressing these distinct fears regarding reporting is even more essential for universities.

Authors

• Madison Adams, Texas A&M University-College Station

• Theresa Morris, Texas A&M University-College Station

• Fizza Raza, Georgia State University

• Susan Saab Fortney