Sexual Harassment Experiences of Undergraduate Students of Kathmandu: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Despite the extensiveness of sexual harassment in Nepal, the studies addressing the subjective experiences of the victims are relatively less. This paper reports the qualitative data from a study of sexual harassment of 100 undergraduate students (80 female) from ages 18 to 24 (M=19.5, SD=1.40)of different colleges of Kathmandu collected through convenience sampling. Data was collected through the use of semi structured interview schedule. Thematic analysis was employed to generate the themes from the responses rendered by participants to the open-ended questions. Three overarching themes emerged from the analysis: experience of the incident, effects of harassment on mental health and education, and dealing with the consequence of harassment. Three sub-themes were subsumed within the first theme, namely: i) characteristics of harassment, ii) perception of harassment and immediate reactions, and iii) contextual factors surrounding harassment. In addition, the second theme revealed the consequences of sexual harassment on the psychological well-being and academic performance of the students. Finally, participants reported employing several coping mechanisms to deal with the consequences of sexual harassment, which are broadly categorized into interpersonal and intrapersonal coping strategies and subsumed within the third theme. These findings are discussed in the light of the existing relevant literature, and their practical implications are discussed in the paper.