Project Summary
Alcohol-involved sexual violence (SV) is a major public health issue among young women. Research
consistently shows that SV in which the victim had been drinking at the time of the assault can have an
especially detrimental impact on survivors’ mental and physical health. Moreover, survivors who were drinking
are more likely than those were not drinking to receive negative reactions—such as blame, disbelief, or
minimization—in response to disclosure of their SV experiences to informal support providers (e.g., friends,
family, significant others). These negative reactions are consistently linked to more negative psychosocial
outcomes for survivors. Despite the clear importance of reactions to disclosure, one glaring gap in the literature
linking negative disclosure responses to adverse psychosocial outcomes among survivors is a lack of
knowledge about the content of disclosures made by survivors. That is, studies to date have simply asked
survivors about the social reactions they received to disclosures, without assessing the language they use
when disclosing their victimization. The present study seeks to fill this gap. The content of survivors’
disclosures—particularly their disclosure of alcohol use and the extent to which they express self-blame and
label their experience as assaultive—may be important mechanisms through which alcohol impairment at the
time of abuse impacts negative social reactions from supports. Three Aims will be pursued to test these
suppositions. First, replicating past work, we expect that women who report greater impairment from alcohol
use will receive greater negative reactions from informal supports. Second, we predict that the relationship
between greater impairment and greater negative reactions will be indirect by way of a) more detail about
impairment, b) greater self-blame, and c) less label use within the disclosure. Finally, to characterize the
content of disclosure and desired outcomes for women survivors of alcohol-involved SV, in-depth qualitative
interviews will be conducted with a purposeful subsample of survivors and their informal disclosure recipients.
Testing hypotheses for Aims 1 and 2 will be accomplished with online survey data collected from a national
sample of 550 women aged 18-25 who report an adult SV in which they consumed alcohol prior to the event
and first disclosed the experience to an informal support provider. Aim 3 will be accomplished though in-depth
qualitative interviews conducted separately with a purposeful subsample of survey participants (n = 30) and
their informal support providers (n = 30). This mixed methods approach has the potential to increase the
breadth and depth of our understanding of the disclosure process while better informing interventions to
educate disclosure recipients to react in a supportive fashion (i.e., by decreasing negative reactions).
