SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF FEMALES IN NIGERIA EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: A BARRIER TO LEARNING AND EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE OF FEMALE STUDENTS

Women are culturally believed to provide emotional support for men and in many occasions some men have taken this as liberty to harass women and girls sexually in educational institutions at the detriment of the girl’s educational performance. This behavior hinders girl’s educational performance and empowerment of girls as it usually leads many of them to study under stress. Hence, the general objective is to discover the relationship between sexual harassment of girls in educational institutions in Nigeria and performance. While the specific objectives include investigating the types of harassment, who harasses who, find out the reason for the harassment, examine the effects on learning and performance of females and discover possible solutions. The methods of collecting data were quantitative and qualitative. Five hundred (500) students were sampled and the quantitative method was analyzed using statistical package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Variables were also cross tabulated in other to provide association and relationship among variables. The finding reveals that female students faced sexual harassment and when such is reported students are always afraid to let it be made know to the harassers for fear of intimidation and failure.