Making the Personal Political: Personal versus Group-Focused Rumination Following Sexual Harassment

The emergence of social media consciousness-raising campaigns, such as #MeToo and #TimesUp that encourage individuals to share their experiences of harassment and hold perpetrators accountable, might, in part, serve to promote a group-focused way of thinking about unwelcomed events that may be adaptive. In the current research, we propose a distinction between two forms of rumination, personal rumination on how that experience personally affected oneself, and group-focused rumination on how the experience is shared by many other members of one's group, and how it impacts them. We apply this distinction to the sexual harassment of women and test the hypothesis that these two forms of post-event rumination predict markedly different psychological consequences. Consistent with a proposed dual rumination model of sexual harassment, we found that personal rumination uniquely mediated an association between sexual harassment and depression through increased brooding about oneself, in an undergraduate (N = 306) and community (N = 203) sample of women. In contrast, group rumination uniquely mediated an association between sexual harassment and gender critical consciousness (systemic injustice awareness and collective action engagement). This pattern suggests that ruminations prompted by a sexual harassment experience are not invariably maladaptive. Repetitive thoughts targeting group-focused construals of a personal, social injustice experience may be both politically adaptive and psychologically beneficial.