What is Slut-Shaming?
Slut-shaming refers to the negative social experiences adolescents may face when they are perceived as being too sexually active, sexualized, or flirtatious. It can take different forms, including insults, rumors, and other forms of peer victimization, and is associated with psychological distress.
Social Relevance
Why Study Slut-Shaming?
Slut-shaming: better understanding this significant social stress in adolescent girls’ lives through a mixed-methods approach
With Alexa Martin-Storey, Ph.D.
(available in French only)
A significant concern among adolescent girls, slut-shaming has been documented in popular culture and qualitative research primarily in relation to bullying associated with their actual or perceived sexual behaviors, as well as behaviors intended to attract sexual attention.
This study advances knowledge on the topic by developing a quantitative measure of slut-shaming that incorporates the associated distress and other forms of victimization. Using a qualitative approach, adolescent girls, parents, and school staff were consulted about how they would like to address and prevent slut-shaming. A mixed-methods approach was then used to document the extent to which adolescent girls experience slut-shaming and to examine how those involved believe this issue should be addressed.
Addressing Research and Policy Gaps
Our findings show how youth find it harder to report on bias-based forms of victimization like slut-shaming than more general forms of victimization. The Chair focuses on addressing gaps in how the content and target of victimization (i.e., slut-shaming) matter for outcomes, and specifically on the need to address slut-shaming and other forms of bias-based victimization in additional to more general victimization.
Impacts on mental health
Gender norms
Slut-shaming and other forms of bias-based victimization impact mental health including depressive symptoms and aggressive behavior by having a negative effect on self-concept, and by making it more difficult to get support.
Gender norms refer to the larger set of written and unwriten rules in a society that identify how boys and girls are supposed to behave. When children are seen by others as violating these norms, they are more likely to experience multiple forms of aggression.
Bullying and victimization
Implications for schools and prevention
Victimization is a term that captures any unwanted verbal, physical or relational aggressive behavior directed towards an individual. Bullying occurs when victimization is experience repeatedly by the same person in the context of a power differential (e.g., a higher status child harms a lower status child).
Schools mandate programs to address victimization and bullying in school. But ignoring the context of bullying, as well as who is most vulnerable to bullying makes some approaches to addressing this problem insufficient.
Peer dynamics
Peer dynamics are the larger ways that young people interact with their friends, their classmates, and other youth their age. The term captures positive processes like freindship and social support, as well as more negative experiences like peer aggression and bullying.
Digital culture and social media
Digital culture refers to the ways that people communicate, carets, share and interact in environments shaped by digital tools. Social media is a set of platforms that faciliate young people's interactions with eachother, where they can post about their thoughts, feelings and experiences, but where they can also be targetted by content from individuals outside of their social networks.
The Slut-Shaming Instrument
Developed by Martin-Storey and colleagues, the Slut-Shaming Instrument provides a quantitative approach to understanding and measuring slut-shaming among adolescent girls. The instrument captures the experiences of slut-shaming and the distress associated with this form of social victimization, supporting research into its prevalence, correlates, and impact on adolescent well-being.
