Undergraduates' Noncompliance with COVID-19 Regulations Is Associated with Lifetime Sexual Harassment Perpetration and Sexist Beliefs

Despite efforts by universities to curb the spread of COVID-19, evidence from a separate, yet surprisingly parallel, domain of research-sexual violence perpetration-suggests that many students violate policies that regulate individual behavior and prohibit non-consensual physical contact. With the theoretical similarities between sexual violence-related behaviors and COVID-19-related behaviors in mind, we conducted two studies to explore associations between students' noncompliance with and attitudes toward COVID-19 safety regulations, their histories of harassment perpetration, and sexual violence-related attitudes. The first, an exploratory study (N = 309), revealed negative correlations between students' compliance with and support for COVID-19 regulations and lifetime sexual harassment perpetration, hostile sexism, and rape myth acceptance, particularly among men. The negative relationship between harassment perpetration and compliance behaviors persisted, even when controlling for multiple covariates that explain variance in antisocial behaviors. The second study (N = 283) replicated this negative relationship, even when controlling for political beliefs. These results suggest that COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors may be a product of larger societal forces that underlie sexual violence perpetration.Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.