Sexual Assault Case Studies

Reporting sexual assaults has been low on college campuses, but increasing slowly. In a study of 740 participants, nearly half of the victims were sexually harassed before the study. Two thirds of the 740 participates stated that they believe their situations were not that serious enough to report, and some also stated that they found their situations serious enough to report but choose not to. 62.5% of the population stated that they felt comfortable talking to someone who was not a part of the campus, and in nearly all of the cases the victims spoke about it to someone who was nots a campus official (Clodfelter 2010). Gender is also a factor that influences reporting. Compared to women, men are much less likely to report sexual coercion and
The forms of media are not also a factor in sexual assaults, but also new technologies like video cameras have become a massive issue with sexual assault since offenders are now able to video tape their assaults and victims when they are unconscious or semiconscious. A specific case study conducted was Audrie Pott. She was drunk and fell asleep at a party, she woke up to people taking photos of her, naked, with words marked on her skin. The photos of Pott were circulated around campus through smartphones. ABC News reported 308,586 photos and 96,20 texts were reviewed only on thirteen smartphones. Even with the large majority not being related to the sexual assault there was still an average of 24,000 photos and about, 400 texts per phone. While cases like Pott are awful, the media plays a large role in sexual assault coverage yet there is not a lot of research on the topic (Heyes
Looking at different types of sports media and their effects on the rape myths shows that women have a positive association with sports media and rape while men have a negative association with individuals and their intentions to intervene. Males also have lower intentions related to bystander intervention. People more likely to tolerate sexual assault will consume more sport media (Hust 2013). Except for sports media, there is research on how parents influences students. There is a relationship between parent’s warnings and college-age student’s perceptions of crime when looking at crime-related television. The frequency of crime television watched increased parents warning towards crime dangers which can be seen as socializing forces that influence perceptions and knowledge (Busselle