Sexual Harassment Myths and Social Justice Perception among College Students in Southeast Nigeria: Implication to Gender-based Sexual Violence and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Sexual harassment across public institutions in some developing nations is more lenient on the sexual harassment myths supported by patriarchal structures. Although sexual harassment myths as a problem has attracted many attentions from the researching community so far, it is yet to be unravelled in some developing nations in connection with social justice and sustainable development. Sexual harassment myths as tools of social injustice are perpetuated by the patriarchal structure and false collective conscience among the youth in educational institutions. This has over the years, entrenched sexual violence against women in the everyday interactions among the youth and the general population in the developing world. In order to understand the prevalence and developmental consequences of sexual harassment myths, the present study focused on the college students (a group that may be expected to be more progressive in its thinking about sexuality and gender differences/relations than the general population), involving 1716 students (17+) of 44 higher institutions of learning in southeast Nigeria. While the study was guided by Structuration/Collective conscience models, survey design with questionnaire instrument was applied to manage the study and data collection procedure. Appropriate statistics were applied to check the relationship of the substantive variables to the study. From the findings, there is a prevalence of acceptance of sexual harassment myths (72.3%/55.6%) among the students; sexual harassment myths1&2 explained about 98%/94% variance of consciousness towards social justice against sexual harassment; predictors of gendered attitude towards sexual harassment myths acceptance are gender, age, source of sex education and perceived institutional sexual harassment policy,while the predicting factors to consciousness towards social justice against sexual harassment included age, religious affiliation, type of secondary school attended and source of sex education.