摘要：Objectives. We investigated physical assault in dating relationships and its co-occurrence with sexual assault from high school through college. Methods. Two classes of university women (n = 1569) completed 5 surveys during their 4 years in college. Results. Women who were physically assaulted as adolescents were at greater risk for revictimization during their freshman year (relative risk = 2.96); each subsequent year, women who have experienced violence remained at greater risk for revictimization than those who have not. Across all years, women who were physically assaulted in any year were significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted that same year. Adolescent victimization was a better predictor of college victimization than was childhood victimization. Conclusions. There is a need for dating violence prevention/intervention programs in high school and college and for research on factors that reduce revictimization. Physical and sexual victimization are serious problems affecting young women in high school and college. In their national sample of college students, White and Koss 1 found that 32% of the women experienced physical dating violence from age 14 through their college years (the average age of the women was 21.4 years). The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 2 based on a nationally representative sample of nearly 7000 high school students, found that 10% of the young women reported having been pushed by a romantic partner in the 18 months before the survey, and 3% reported having something thrown at them by a partner. National data on sexual assault indicate that half of all females who experience sexual assault are between the ages of 12 and 24 years 3 and that most rapes occur before age 24 years. 4 A longitudinal study by Humphrey and White 5 found that 69.8% of college women had experienced at least 1 instance of sexual violence from age 14 through the fourth year of college. Adolescence (i.e., ages 14–18 years) is a particularly risky time for dating violence. In the 1997 South Carolina Youth Behavior Risk Survey, 6 9.7% of girls in grades 9 through 12 reported being “beaten up” by a boyfriend, and 21.3% reported being sexually assaulted. Data from the 1999 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey 7 for this same age group indicated that the lifetime rate of being “physically hurt” by a dating partner was 15.4% and the lifetime rate of sexual assault was 9.1%. Humphrey and White 5 found that 50% of their sample of college women reported sexual victimization only in adolescence. They as well as Gidycz et al. 8 found that women who were sexually victimized in high school were at greater risk for sexual victimization in college. Except for the studies by Humphrey and White 5 and Gidycz et al., 8 studies of dating violence have been cross-sectional. Little is known about the occurrence or recurrence of physical victimization longitudinally or whether young women who are victimized as children or as adolescents are at greater risk for victimization in college. Data also are lacking on covictimization, defined here as both physical and sexual assault occurring within the same time period but not necessarily simultaneously during a single violent event or with the same perpetrator. We do not know whether covictimization is inevitable, given the high incidence of both physical and sexual assault, or whether it is a distinct form of dating violence victimization. We report findings from a larger longitudinal study of the correlates and consequences of sexual and physical victimization from high school through the fourth year of college. 5, 9 We examined the time course of physical victimization from adolescence through 4 years of college to assess (1) the prevalence of physical victimization in dating relationships over time, (2) the extent to which experiences with childhood victimization (e.g., witnessing domestic violence, being sexually victimized, being physically assaulted by a family member) affect the probability of physical victimization in high school and in college, (3) how being victimized in high school affects a woman’s probability of being revictimized in college, and (4) whether women who are physically assaulted within the span of a year are likely to be sexually assaulted during that same year (i.e., covictimized).
