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The Effect Of Victim’S Responses To Coercive Sexual Harassment On Bystander Intentions And Moral Perceptions, Inna M. Learn

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Female graduate students are targets of coercive sexual harassment (SH) three times more than female undergraduates; 67.8% of their harassers were university faculty. While SH victims expected peer support, peers often socially rejected female victims of coercive SH. Gray and Wegner’s theory of dyadic morality and Bowes-Sperry and O’Leary-Kelly’s bystander response model guided this quantitative study to examine the effect of victim response on helping intentions by peers. After reading the same vignette that described coercive SH, 207 student participants read one of four randomly assigned victim’s responses: victim did nothing, directly confronted the professor during the incident, sought peer …