In this issue, our spotlight is on institutional betrayal in high school in the context of gender harassment. Monika Lind and Alexis Adams-Clark, Courage Research Associates, discuss their new research article, “Isn’t high school bad enough already? Rates of gender harassment and institutional betrayal in high school and their association with trauma-related symptoms”.

Isn’t High School Bad Enough Already?
Monika Lind & Alexis Adams-Clark

Important work occurs in adolescence. In the midst of physical, neurological, and psychological changes, adolescents undertake the intertwined tasks of social learning and identity development. Adolescents must also develop future-oriented, goal-directed skills that allow them to assume adult roles. Adolescence is a sensitive period, second only to infancy in its plasticity and its potential for positive or negative inflection points. In many ways, high school is the “workplace” where the important work of adolescence occurs. Our study investigates whether gender harassment and institutional betrayal create a hostile work environment in high schools and interfere with healthy adolescent development.

Gender harassment is a type of sexual harassment characterized by sexist remarks, sexually crude or offensive behavior, and enforcement of traditional gender roles. Institutional betrayal is the failure of an institution, such as a school, to protect people who depend on the institution. In our study, we asked 535 college students to reflect on their experiences in high school and their current trauma-related symptoms, including mental, physical, and emotional challenges. From their responses, we learned that the more gender harassment and institutional betrayal teens encounter in high school, the more mental, physical, and emotional challenges they experience in college. In other words, our study suggests that gender harassment and institutional betrayal may hurt young people, and it is important that educators and researchers pay more attention to these issues.

Our study replicates three important findings. First, we found a high prevalence of gender harassment in high school. Second, we found the experience of sex-based harassment is associated with negative outcomes, which is well established in the literature. Third, we found that men reported experiencing less harassment than women, again mirroring a well-established pattern of results. Three of 535 participants had a non-binary gender identity, and we opted to exclude their data from the figure in order to avoid over-generalizing from a small sample.

Two innovative findings stand out as the most important contributions of this study. First, identifying the relationship between high school gender harassment and college trauma-related symptoms provides support for the continued investigation of gender harassment as an impediment to healthy adolescent development. This finding suggests that gender harassment merits increased attention in high schools. Second, high school institutional betrayal’s association with college trauma-related symptoms above and beyond gender, race, age, and gender harassment highlights the responsibility of schools to grapple with the potential harm caused by their indifference to harassment in their hallways. This finding extends the foundational research on institutional betrayal by focusing on gender harassment and institutional betrayal in adolescence.