Victim silence, perpetrator denial, and institutional shielding: An archival study of gendered power imbalances in sexual assaults at Chinese universities

No empirical study has systematically investigated the role of power imbalance in sexual harassment and assault within the Chinese college and university context. Addressing this gap, we used search engines, news media, and social platforms to collect 93 publicly reported real-world cases of sexual harassment and assault by men against women at Chinese colleges and universities up until the end of 2023. We coded these cases for general characteristics, power status of perpetrators and victims, severity of sexual harassment and assault, and the post-incident behaviours of the victims, the perpetrators, and their colleges/universities. The results demonstrated that features of the power imbalance between perpetrators and victims were significantly associated with the behaviour of the victims, perpetrators, and colleges/universities after the assault. Specifically, the victim being single and in an isolated environment predicted greater severity of the sexual harassment and assault. The prominence of the perpetrator’s administrative position predicted a greater likelihood of the victim denouncing the perpetrator after graduation rather than before graduation. The lower the economic status of the victim’s family, the higher the ranking of the college/university that employed the perpetrator, and the perpetrator’s membership in the Communist Party of China (CPC) predicted a greater tendency for the perpetrator to deny allegations of harassment and assault. Finally, the perpetrator’s membership in the CPC and the higher the ranking of the college/university predicted the tendency for the college/university to obstruct the victims’ rights. Overall, these findings underscore the ways in which features of the deeply rooted power imbalance between male perpetrators and female victims shape responses to sexual harassment and assault within Chinese colleges and universities. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.