UB study finds circumstances of sexual assault differ before, during pandemic

A UB study on sexual assault during the pandemic concluded with good news and bad news.

The good: The research led by Jennifer Livingston, associate professor in the School of Nursing, and published in the journal Psychology of Violence, found that sexual assaults decreased by nearly 50% during the pandemic.

The bad: While the actual number of sexual assaults declined, the circumstances of those assaults that did occur differed significantly from those occurring pre-pandemic.

The study, “Sexual Assault in the Context of Daily Level Changes in Socializing and Substance Use Prior to and During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” evolved out of research being conducted in the lab of Jennifer P. Read, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, and Craig Colder, professor of psychology and director of graduate studies.

Livingston was a co-investigator on that research, which was designed to study the role of social context in understanding alcohol-involved sexual assault risk. Researchers used daily reports collected from 181 women between the ages of 22-25 both prior to and during the pandemic social restrictions to examine how alcohol use within the social context was related to women’s sexual assault risk for that day. 

The team, which included Eugene Maguin, research scientist in the Department of Psychology, collected the women’s daily reports of socializing, alcohol and other substance use, and sexual assault on weekend days for three weekends in a row, at three different times during the year — for a total of 27 days per year — for three years encompassing the period from 2019-21.

“We were a little over a year into the study when the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown occurred in March 2020,” Livingston recalls. “We recognized that we had a rare opportunity to see how changes in the contexts in which the women in our study socialized and used alcohol were related to sexual assault risk before and during the pandemic.

“Initially, we were focused on risk factors found in public settings, such as bars or parties,” Livingston explains. “When the pandemic shutdown occurred, women in the study stopped, or reduced, spending time in these contexts. Because exposure to these public risk factors was reduced, it gave me the idea that we should see whether the change in social contexts reduced the likelihood of experiencing sexual assault.”

Given the social restrictions in place during the pandemic, the research team ­— co-authors Read, Maguin and Colder, as well as Livingston, hypothesized there would be a decline in sexual assaults reported during the pandemic. 

“We speculated that if women were no longer hanging out in large groups and going to bars or parties, they would be less likely to be exposed to potential offenders who tend to be in those settings,” says Livingston.

“This turned out to be accurate. During the pandemic, women were less likely to go to bars or parties, were more likely to spend time with one person rather than a large group, and were less likely to drink compared to what they did prior to the pandemic.”

Study results showed the number of sexual assaults reported during the pandemic decreased by about half compared to the pre-pandemic period, Livingston says.

This was the good news, but there is more to the story, she notes. 

During this time, young adults became more likely to drink at home, either alone or with one or two people, rather than at bars or parties with large groups of individuals. By virtue of reducing women’s exposure to the number of potential perpetrators that are often present in large public social settings, the risk of sexual assault should have decreased over the pandemic. However, the isolation brought about by the pandemic also adversely affected women’s well-being in ways that may have exacerbated other sexual assault risks, according to the researchers.

Sexual assaults did not stop altogether, Livingston says. When the researchers examined the characteristics of assaults occurring during the pandemic, they found they differed from pre-pandemic assaults.

“During the pandemic, women reported they were more likely to socialize at their home or someone else’s home and spend time with a current or previous romantic partner compared to before the pandemic,” she says. “Thus, when sexual assaults did occur, the perpetrators were more likely to be a current or ex-partner than casual acquaintances.”

 Although the incidence of alcohol use overall was lower during the pandemic, the researchers say, alcohol use on a given day still increased women’s risk of being sexually assaulted on that day, both before and during the pandemic. The authors further stress that it is the presence of a person who is willing to aggress sexually that causes sexual assault, not women’s alcohol use.

“In sum,” says Read, “as one type of risk receded (assault in social settings that involve alcohol, groups of people, unknown males), another (assault by a partner, at home) became more prominent.”

The findings, according to the researchers, highlight how social contexts contribute to the risk of sexual violence and the need for prevention strategies that address social context/setting. Much of the sexual assault prevention work that has been done has focused on reducing alcohol-involved sexual assault that occurs in social settings, Livingston says. 

More work is needed to understand and prevent sexual violence that occurs within intimate relationships, with or without alcohol involvement, the researchers say. For example, interventions that promote effective communication and healthy relationships may be promising approaches to reducing intimate partner sexual violence.

The long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s health and well-being are still being uncovered, they add.