This paper presents a comprehensive measure of sexual victimization that includes incident reports to obtain detailed accounts of sexual victimizations.
The measurement instrument described brings together the best of much of the existing relevant work to measure sexual victimization. Despite acknowledgment of the pitfalls and criticisms of some of the existing measures, the measure presented includes what was "good" about these measures, while incorporating new approaches and concepts. The measure is more comprehensive than previous measures, as it includes items that measure traditional rapes, along with less traditional rapes (oral and anal rapes and rape with a foreign object), less serious physical sexual contact (e.g., grabbing and fondling), sexual harassment, and stalking. Moreover, these items are measured in a way that allows the distinguishing of less and more serious victimizations; the legal and illegal may be separated as well. This measurement instrument is ideal for capturing the broad range of sexual victimization potentially experienced by college women, with a data-collection method that allows for presenting statistics on all of the various forms of sexual victimization. 12 notes and 68 references