Online sexual violence experiences of female university students and determination of coping methods

Aim: The study aims to determine the online sexual violence experiences and coping methods of female university students. Material and Method: The study is of descriptive relational type. The universe of the research consists of 3.897.140 female students studying at the associate and undergraduate level of universities in Turkey, and the sample consists of 604 students collected by the snowball sampling method. In the study, data have been collected via Google Form, Participant Introduction Form and SZBÇÖ. In the analysis of the data, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis coefficients, One-way variance, Kruskall Wallis, Mann-Whitney U, Chi-square analysis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Student t-test have been used. Results: In the study, it was determined that students use social networks mostly for watching movies/listening to music and one-fourth of them experienced sexual violence online. The most common experience of online sexual violence that students are exposed to is "Receiving disturbingly sexually explicit messages/e-mails/photos/videos" and "Receiving calls from hidden phone numbers and disturbing obscene sounds". It has been determined that the platform where online sexual violence is most applied is Instagram and it is mostly applied by foreign people. Evaluating the SZBÇÖ scores of the students who were exposed to online sexual violence, it was seen that the Social Support and Help-seeking sub-dimension scores were below the average, while the Struggling and Online Security sub-dimension scores were above the average. In addition, it was determined that students who did not know the age of the perpetrator of online sexual violence had higher mean scores for seeking social support (p<0.05). Conclusion: In the study, it was determined that the rate of female students being exposed to online sexual violence is high and they are mostly exposed to violence by unknown people. It has been determined that the students' tendency to seek social support and help as a coping method is low, and their tendency to struggle and online security is high.