Rape treatment generally takes the form of standard trauma intervention, which may limit its ability to resolve rape-specific symptoms. For the sake of optimizing such treatment, the present study seeks to distinguish specific post-rape symptoms from those observed following other forms of trauma, particularly in respect to self-blame and related PTSD. Given typical societal victimblaming following rape, self-blame is expected to be considerably more extreme among survivors of rape than in other victims, and predictive of relatively elevated post-trauma symptoms. Three hundred and four participants completed measures of blame attribution and PTSD, substantiating the hypotheses. Implications for rape treatment and social change are discussed.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Sexual violence against women and girls in Israel is rather prevalent. To address this problem, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) provides rape prevention programs for middle to high school teens. These programs have been in place for several decades, but their effectiveness has not been evaluated empirically to date. This study seeks to fill this gap by performing an evaluation of one such preventive program. Three hundred and ninety-four 11th graders completed a preintervention and postintervention questionnaire, assessing their rape-related attitudes and behaviors. Results indicate a significant improvement following the workshop in the understanding of what distinguishes rape from mutually consensual relations, along with a substantial shift in many rape-supportive attitudes. At the same time, some victim blaming still remained. Likewise, self-reported behavioral changes were minimal, possibly because of a ceiling effect. Implications for future rape prevention programs in Israel are discussed.