Caught in the Web: A Study of Help-Seeking for Sexual Victimization

In the past decade, scientific attention to sexual victimization has grown. Specific attention to contact sexual violence (CSV; sexual victimization involving bodily contact) arose following the 2017 #MeToo movement. Recently, online and non-contact forms of sexual violence are gaining attention, specifically image-based sexual harassment (IBSH; sending unsolicited intimate images) and abuse (IBSA; the non-consensual creation and/or sharing of intimate images, or threats to share). Considering the wide-ranging consequences and negative impact of CSV and IBSHA, victims may disclose their victimization with the goal of seeking and receiving help. To this end, victims may seek help from informal sources, such as friends, and formal sources, including healthcare professionals.
Recent statistics indicate that a great number of CSV and IBSHA victims in the Netherlands do not seek support. It remains unclear why victims refrain from seeking help. This information is pivotal for informal and formal sources of support in encouraging help-seeking, responding to victims, and improving support provision. Therefore, this dissertation provides an in-depth study of the help-seeking behavior of CSV and IBSHA victims in the Netherlands, with a focus on the factors that may discourage or encourage help-seeking (barriers and facilitators). The five empirical chapters are shortly highlighted below.
Chapter 2: Although CSV victims’ help-seeking behavior has been widely studied, studies have focused on English-speaking Western countries and student samples. Therefore, the first study examines the help-seeking behavior and barriers to help-seeking of CSV victims (18+) in the Netherlands using a mixed-methods design.
Chapter 3: Although (inter)national literature on IBSHA has recently grown, research on the help-seeking behavior of IBSHA victims remains in its infancy. Therefore, the second study provides a systematic overview of the current state of literature on IBSHA victims’ help-seeking behavior to highlight what is hitherto known and the current lacunae.
Chapter 4: The third study expands upon Chapter 3 with an in-depth empirical examination of the help-seeking behavior of IBSHA victims (12-25) in the Netherlands using a mixed-methods approach.
Chapter 5: Research directly comparing CSV and IBSHA victims’ help-seeking behavior appears to lack. The fourth study provides an exploratory quantitative comparison of the help-seeking behavior of CSV and IBSHA victims, and barriers to help-seeking.
Chapter 6: The fifth study provides a practical application of the prior findings by examining whether help-seeking for IBSHA may be encouraged by an A/B-testing experiment with advertisements on Snapchat among youth (13-25).
The dissertation concludes with a summary of the main findings, stressing that not every victim of CSV and IBSHA seeks help. The decision to seek help is complex and subject to various factors that may encourage or discourage victims, which appear related to the individual, institutional, interpersonal, and sociocultural context. To further highlight this, the dissertation offers a revised theoretical framework to conceptualize victims’ decision-making process to seeking help based on earlier conceptual frameworks and relevant theory (e.g., Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory of human development).
An elaborate summary of the dissertation can be found in the dissertation itself. For Dutch, see page 267. For English, see page 279.