Prevalence of Sexual Harassment of Female Students of Tertiary Education in Taraba State, North East Nigeria: Implications for Counselling

Abstract

The study was set out to investigate prevalence of sexual harassment of female students of tertiary education in Taraba State North East, Nigeria. One research question and one hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. The researcher used “Sexual Harassment of Female Students of Tertiary Education Questionnaire” (SHOFSOTEQ) to collect information for the investigation. The instrument was made up of 14 items and had a reliability coefficient of 0.85. It had content validity and language appropriateness. The researcher used three research assistants to administer copies of the questionnaire on the respondents. The researcher chose 2.50 as a benchmark for either agreeing or disagreeing with each of the items. The One-Way Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The study found out that: there is prevalence of sexual harassment of female students of tertiary education in Taraba State. Sexual harassment of female students’ were carried out through inappropriate sexual comments, unwanted touching of female students’ breasts, tapping of female students’ buttocks and enticing of female students with high scores for sex amongst other. The result also revealed that there is no significant difference among the respondents in the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education on the prevalence of sexual harassment of female students. One of the recommendations is that authorities of tertiary educational institutions should put in place adequate measures to ensure that lecturers do not leak examination questions to students.