A Developmental Examination of Adolescent Girls’ Concerns and Strategies for Navigating Romance and Sexuality

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Social Relationships

Abstract

Background: Despite the reported prevalence of adolescent girls’ receipt of sexual harassment and sexually-assaultive behaviors, prior literature and our cultural conversation about these issues have focused on the experiences of adult women. A large gap about girls’ expectations and navigation of experiences in the romantic and sexual domain remains. For example, the recent #MeToo movement highlights the prevalence of sexually coercive or assaultive experiences amongst women, yet the implications of rape culture on adolescent girls’ appraisals of their emergent romance and sexuality are largely unknown.

Methods: Using data from a larger longitudinal study of urban (77% Black/ African American; median household income $32,000) adolescent girls’ development, the current study aimed to fill this gap by using thematic analysis to examine girls’ anticipated concerns and behavioral strategies for navigating normative boy-girl and partnered interactions. Girls (T1; Mage = 12.5; N = 93) generated stories from ambiguous photos of boy-girl interactions during their early adolescence. Stories were coded for romantic and sexual themes, presence of conflicting differences, concerns, and behavioral strategies for resolving or managing the differences. During their middle and late adolescence (T4; Mage = 16.3; N = 70), girls’ recollections of their navigation of a sexually-pressuring virtual reality scene with an avatar romantic partner were coded for perception of threat, presence of the avatar’s aggressive behavior, and girls’ anticipated outcomes for the interaction.

Results: Analysis of girls’ responses revealed that across both timepoints, most girls perceived boys’ or their partners’ romantic or sexual pursuit as an indiscriminately threatening one from which she must protect or defend herself. From this defensive stance, some girls expected to use refusal strategies (i.e. leave the situation, preemptive violence, verbal refusal) to diffuse the threat of the conflict between her and her partners’ advances. Others did not appear to believe in their ability to diffuse the perceived threat of her partner’s advances, and some anticipated that interactions would conclude with their sexual victimization. A small portion did not seem to perceive threat from conflicting romantic/sexual desires and expressed and negotiated their desires with the boy or their avatar partner, ultimately resolving the conflict.

Conclusion: Girls’ emergence in the romantic and sexual domain appears fraught with concerns about navigating conflicting desire and perceived threats to their physical safety and social standing. Given girls’ development in the context of a rape culture, our findings that girls have a limited behavioral repertoire for navigating emergent romance and sexuality, and that some expect romantic and sexual conflict to conclude with their sexual violation is perhaps unsurprising. Our results are, however, especially sobering given our predominately Black/African American femme sample, a group for whom the legacy of sexual violence and femicide remains salient. More work is needed to disrupt practices that propagate rape culture. Reframing the conversation around consent from one of managing its absence (i.e., minimizing coercion and refusing unwanted behaviors) to one of its inevitably may give girls and the eventual women they become more tools to be confident as effective agents of their own desires and autonomy.

Authors

• Jami C Pittman, University of Maryland School of Medicine
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Olin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Zenaida Rivera, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Davia Steinberg
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole Kouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Valerie A Simon, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author