Sexual Harassment and Manly Sports: Are They Related?

This study investigates the relationship between sexual harassment and participation in "manly" sports (i.e., football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and wrestling) at the high school level. Manly sports are defined as those sports that celebrate values of dominance, aggression, male solidarity, and female exclusion. Participants were 353 11th- and 12th-grade boys in a suburban school district. A survey was developed to measure students' sex-role stereotyping and adversarial attitudes, sexually harassing behaviors, sports participation, and perceptions of sports affiliation of peer sexual harassers. Results revealed a positive correlation between the attitude and behavior factors. Boys who expressed sexist attitudes were also the ones who reported more frequent engagement in sexually harassing behavior toward girls. Analysis indicates that all boys believed that a sexual harasser was more than likely to be a member of a manly sports team than to be a nonathlete or a member of any of the other available high school sports teams. However, no meaningful relationship was found between either attitude or behavior and sports participation. (Contains 43 references.) (RJM)