Sexual Harassment,Racial Harassment,and Well-Being among Asian American Women: An Intersectional Approach

ABSTRACT

Harassment of Asian American (AA) women has received little attention in popular culture and academic research despite their long legacy of sexualized racial stereotyping (e.g., Geisha, sexually submissive; Shimizu, 2007) and additional risk of mistreatment due to their membership in both marginalized gender and racial groups (Beale, 1970 Beale, F. (1970). Double jeopardy: To be Black and female. In T. C. Bambara (Ed.), The Black woman: An anthology (pp. 90–100). New York: New American Library. [Google Scholar]; Settles & Buchanan, 2014 Settles, I. H., & Buchanan, N. T. (2014). Intersectionality: Multiple categories of identity and difference. In V. Benet-Martinez and Y. Hong (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity (pp. 160–180). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. [Google Scholar]). This study addresses this dearth of research using an intersectional theoretical framework to comprehensively examine sexual and racial harassment with a sample of AA women. Results validated the underlying factor structure of the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995 Fitzgerald, L. F., Gelfand, M. J., & Drasgow, F. (1995). Measuring sexual harassment: Theoretical and psychometric advances. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 425–445. doi:10.1207/s15324834basp1704_2[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the Racial Acts, Crimes, and Experiences Scale (RACES; Bergman & Buchanan, 2008 Bergman, M., & Buchanan, N. T. (2008). Development of the Racial Acts, Crimes, and Experiences Survey (RACES). Unpublished instrument. [Google Scholar]) for AA women. Additionally, our results replicated previous research indicating that participants often reported experiencing behaviors that constitute harassment, but did not label them as such. This supports the use of behavioral measures over items that require individuals to label their experiences as harassment. Finally, we examined the associations between these forms of harassment and two indicators of psychological well-being, depression, and posttraumatic stress (PTS). Our results found that gender harassment was associated with more depression, whereas unwanted sexual attention, sexual coercion, and racial harassment were associated with increased PTS. This supports the utility of including both sexual and racial harassment in providing a more nuanced understanding of AA women’s harassment experiences overall and the relationship of harassment to psychological well-being. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications of these findings.     

The Role of Maternal Acceptance in the Relation Between Community Violence Exposure and Child Functioning

Children in the United States are exposed to considerable community violence that has been linked to child functioning. However, not all those exposed, experience negative outcomes. Recent research has focused on factors that “buffer” or protect children from negative consequences of violence exposure. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the potential buffering or moderating role of maternal acceptance in the relationship between community violence exposure and internalizing and externalizing problems. Subjects were 268 urban African American first graders. Community violence exposure was significantly related to symptoms of post-traumatic stress, but did not correlate with either internalizing or externalizing problems for all children, after control for demographics, maternal mental health, and general life stress. However, children's perceptions of maternal acceptance moderated the relationship between violence exposure and internalizing and externalizing problems which included being withdrawn, anxious-depressed, and demonstrating delinquent behavior. Children with the lowest levels of self-reported maternal acceptance were most impacted by community violence. In this sample of urban first graders, low levels of maternal acceptance placed children at greater risk for adverse outcomes associated with community violence exposure compared to moderate and high levels of maternal acceptance.     

Assaultive violence and the risk of posttraumatic stress disorder following a subsequent trauma

Breslau, Peterson, and Shultz (2008) reported that prior trauma alone, in the absence of PTSD, did not predict an increased PTSD risk, relative to no prior trauma. Only prior trauma that resulted in PTSD predicted an increased PTSD risk following a subsequent trauma. Recently, Cougle, Resnick, and Kilpatrick (2009) proposed that the effect of prior trauma might vary by type of prior trauma, a possibility not considered in Breslau et al. They report that childhood sexual or physical assault, in the absence of PTSD, increased the PTSD risk following a subsequent trauma. This report examines the PTSD effects of prior assaultive violence, using data from Breslau et al. (1998). The study assessed PTSD in relation to up to three events. Analysis was performed on the subset with PTSD assessment for two distinct events, the earliest trauma and a subsequent trauma (n = 967), using as reference persons with no prior trauma (n = 972). Neither prior assaultive violence nor other prior traumas, in the absence of PTSD, influenced the subsequent risk of PTSD. In contrast, prior PTSD increased considerably the PTSD risk of a subsequent trauma. The limitations in Cougle et al. (2009) and in this study and future research directions are discussed.     

Before they're victims: Rethinking youth‐targeted relationship abuse prevention in Australia

Intimate partner abuse (or relationship abuse) against women is recognised as a major public health issue. A number of relationship abuse prevention programs targeted at youth have been developed in Australia. These programs are generally aimed at changing attitudes, and take the stance that girls should not be viewed as being responsible for protecting themselves against violence. In this paper it is argued that the current, dominant focus on physical violence, over other forms of relationship abuse, limits the potential effectiveness of programs that might otherwise help young people to resist the development of abusive dynamics. It is also argued that programs that presume a victim status for girls and a perpetrator status for boys are both inconsistent with contemporary evidence and unlikely to empower young people at risk of chronic perpetration and/or victimisation to avoid such outcomes. A dyadic slippery slope model of chronic relationship abuse is proposed and new directions for prevention research in this area are suggested.     

Race and sex in a lifetime

Abstract: The Jungian analysts who participated in the writing of this paper 1 explicitly or implicitly address issues of social and political stasis, retrogression and change via their particular usages of the concept of the transcendent function. Singer proposes that the transcendent function is a term that is usually applied to individuals in whom symbolic material appears that suggests the reconciling of opposites, leading to psycho‐spiritual growth. He also looks at the notion of the transcendent function as it can appear in a similar way in the collective psyche. In addition, he gives attention to the opposite phenomenon—what might be called the descendent function—as it appears in the collective psyche and its leadership, wherein symbolic material can create the division of groups of people into opposites, mobilizing destructive rather than transformative experience. Meador states that Jung designated the mediating process of assimilating unconscious images and ideas into consciousness as the transcendent function. Just as this synthesizing process can produce insight in the individual, it can also be applied to changes in collective society. Embedded collective assumptions tend to shift when opposites collide, as they did, for example, in the turmoils of the 1960s. Her contribution focuses on the recent revolution in racial and sexual attitudes as the product of a collective struggle between certain ingrained social mores from the past and conflicting new points of view. Samuels’ conclusion is that the concept of the transcendent function has little value with respect to political problems. His contribution focuses on: (i) The limitations of using ideas (such as the transcendent function) derived from analysis with individuals in furtherance of an understanding of social and political phenomena. (ii) The specific problem of a lack of credible psycho‐political models for social progress and regress—he argues that the transcendent function is not useful in this regard. (iii) The question of political aggression, violence and conflict in society is explored from the standpoint of the transcendent function so as to investigate its possible role in the management of political conflict. Samuels severely criticizes what he terms ‘triangulation’ and ‘hyper‐reflection’ on the part of analysts who engage with political debates and issues. (iv) Leadership is examined from the standpoint of the transcendent function which, again, does not seem pertinent. Rather, new discoveries in family psychology about the role of the father have greater possibilities as a basis for new thinking about leadership.     

Aversive racism and medical interactions with Black patients: A field study

Medical interactions between Black patients and nonBlack physicians are usually less positive and productive than same-race interactions. We investigated the role that physician explicit and implicit biases play in shaping physician and patient reactions in racially discordant medical interactions. We hypothesized that whereas physicians’ explicit bias would predict their own reactions, physicians’ implicit bias, in combination with physician explicit (self-reported) bias, would predict patients’ reactions. Specifically, we predicted that patients would react most negatively when their physician fit the profile of an aversive racist (i.e., low explicit-high implicit bias). The hypothesis about the effects of explicit bias on physicians’ reactions was partially supported. The aversive racism hypothesis received support. Black patients had less positive reactions to medical interactions with physicians relatively low in explicit but relatively high in implicit bias than to interactions with physicians who were either: (a) low in both explicit and implicit bias, or (b) high in both explicit and implicit bias.     

The Role of Socioeconomic Status in Interactions with Police Among a National Sample of Women Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence

Using a national dataset of 820 women who had called the police for an incident of intimate partner violence, this study explored the relationship between several components of socioeconomic status (education, income, and employment), race, and the nature of interactions with police. Over and above the effects of control variables (the presence of an advocate on the scene, the severity of violence in the relationship, and prior calls to police), victims with higher education reported less positive interactions, less control during the interactions, and lower effectiveness of police. Race did not moderate these relationships, and the other components of socioeconomic status were not significantly related to any of the outcomes. Exploratory tests of mediation found that the relationship between education and the quality of interactions with police was explained by the fact that more educated victims felt they had less control in these incidents and were less likely to see the offender arrested. Results also provide evidence for the positive impact of advocates on interactions with police. Implications for research and policy are discussed.     

Do Guns in the Home Predict Gender and Relationship Attitudes? An Exploratory Study

This study explores the potential relationship of guns in students’ homes with attitudes indicative of tolerance of violence, negative attitudes toward women and their roles, and attitudes suggestive of myths regarding sexual assault. Seniors in Kentucky high schools whose families possessed guns (n = 1,749) produced higher scores on scales measuring these variables as well as on scales of relationship dependency and religious involvement than seniors whose families did not own guns (n = 912). Students whose families owned more than 10 guns tended to score highest on these measures compared with students whose families owned no guns or a few guns. Because of lower effect sizes, these significant associations require further investigation.     

Maternal Depressed Mood and Perceptions of Child Temperament

Research has suggested that women who experience postpartum depression are subsequently more likely to perceive their preschool-aged children as temperamentally difficult and maladjusted. However, previous studies have not controlled for the effects of concurrent depression levels on maternal ratings of child temperament or evaluated the accuracy of maternal reports. In the present study we assessed maternal and paternal ratings of child temperament 2 years after subjects had participated in a study of postpartum depression. The findings indicate that correlations between postpartum depression and subsequent child temperament ratings were accounted for statistically by concurrent levels of depression. Although fathers' ratings corroborated some aspects of maternal perceptions, levels of parental agreement were only moderately high. Moreover, discrepancies between the parents' reports were significantly associated with maternal depression, indicating that parental disagreement is more likely when the wife is dysphoric.