Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Over 4.6 million Canadian women experience sexual victimization, one of the most detrimental sexual health outcomes. Experiences of sexual victimization are associated with the development of psychological disorders as well as chronic health conditions and higher mortality. Sexual victimization is also estimated to cost $4.8 billion in healthcare and social justice in Canada alone. Given the enormity of the personal and economic costs, there is a pressing need to develop more effective prevention programming. To do so we need to (a) understand what factors put individuals most at risk and (b) identify malleable targets facilitating this relationship. One of the most robust risk factors for adulthood sexual victimization identified in the literature to date is experiences of maltreatment in childhood. However, different types of maltreatment result in differential outcomes. Indeed, maltreatment exposures that are physically/psychologically threatening are especially linked to negative sexual outcomes. One way in which they may be linked is through greater sensitivity to rewards; this increased sensitivity increases the propensity to seek out sexual rewards in the environment due to their inherently pleasurable nature, but simultaneously put women at greater risk for sexual victimization. Thus, I will examine if the relationship between threatening maltreatment exposures and sexual victimization is mediated by heightened reward processing and higher engagement risky sexual behaviours. The study will be multimodal and longitudinal in design, examining the neural, behavioural, and cognitive facets of reward processing over 8 months. Moreover, I will employ best practices in research by incorporating gold-standard contextual interview methods. This study could serve not only to identify women most at risk for this detrimental sexual health outcome but also provide more effective prevention targets for the development of sexual assault prevention programming.