Profiles of Adolescent Relationship Abuse and Sexual Harassment By Age: A Latent Class Analysis

Introduction: Separate bodies of literature have emerged showing that adolescent relationship abuse (ARA, also known as teen dating violence or TDV) and youth sexual harassment (SH) are widespread public health problems with significant negative consequences. This study builds upon the well-documented overlap between subtypes of ARA, between ARA/SH victimization and perpetration, as well as between ARA and SH. The goal of this study is to identify homogeneous groups of individuals based on their victimization and perpetration experiences of three subtypes of ARA, i.e. physical, psychological, and sexual, and SH.

Methods: Our study goes beyond past studies using local non-representative samples to extend this work with a nationally representative sample of youth ages 12-18 from the national Survey on Teen Relationships and Intimate Violence (STRiV). Respondents were in a current or recent (within the past 12 months) dating relationship at the time of the interview. A person-centered approach, i.e. latent class analysis, is used to identify profiles based on individuals’ victimization and perpetration experiences of subtypes of ARA and SH. Based on our previous finding that there are greater age differences than sex differences in ARA victimization and perpetration rates (e.g., younger teens reported significantly lower rates of psychological and sexual ARA victimization and perpetration), and the well-established developmental milestone of transitioning into high school approximately aligning with the age groups, we stratify the study analyses by age (271 youth for ages 12-15; 396 youth ages 16-18), in order to investigate the variation in the co-occurrence patterns of ARA and SH victimization and/or perpetration across age groups.

Results: A three-class model was selected to best represent the data for both ages, i.e. “Low (nearly zero) Abuse”, “High Abuse”, and “Psychological Only”. However, differences in class prevalence as well as class profiles emerged between the two age groups. For example, older teens within the “High Abuse” class have considerable higher rates for most of the sub-scales of ARA and SH. Results also indicate that SH tends to co-occur particularly with psychological ARA victimization and perpetration, especially for younger teens.

Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of examining SH and subtypes ARA victimization and perpetration concurrently. SH rarely occurs alone, at least among those involved in a dating relationship. The presentation will expand on the results related to the overlap between subtypes of ARA and SH, discussing potential the implications to prevention.