Image Based Sexual Abuse proclivity and victim blaming

Abstract

Image Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) denotes the creation, distribution, and/or threat of distribution of intimate images of another person online without their consent. The present study aims to extend emerging research on perpetration of IBSA with the development and preliminary validation for the moral disengagement in IBSA scale, while also examining the role of the dark triad, sadism, and sexism in a person’s likelihood to perpetrate IBSA. One hundred and twenty English speaking participants (76 women, 44 men; mean age=33 years) were recruited via social media. Machiavellianism and psychopathy were found to predict IBSA proclivity, whilst rivalry narcissism predicted greater feelings of excitement and amusement towards IBSA. Moral disengagement predicted IBSA proclivity and blaming the victim. It was also positively related to greater feelings of amusement and excitement towards IBSA. This suggests a distinct personality profile of IBSA perpetrators, and that moral disengagement mechanisms play a role in facilitating and reinforcing this behaviour.

Did They Deserve It? Adolescents’ Perception of Online Harassment in a Real-Case Scenario

“…Finally, the results showed that the victims’ perception of violation of the law was higher among middle students than both the biennium and triennium students, consistent with greater use among younger adolescents of moral disengagement mechanisms, such as victim-blaming, resulting in greater feelings of responsibility by the victim for what happened [ 25 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ].…”

“…It consists of four behavioral loci by which individuals regulate their conduct, including: justifying the behavior, shifting responsibility, minimizing the harm caused, and shifting the causal focus to the victim [ 27 ]. Moral disengagement predicts both sexual harassment and cyber-aggression by using: moral justification or diffusing responsibility to consider oneself as less responsible for one’s actions; euphemistic labeling, for example, considering these behaviors as funny or jokey; victim-blaming by attributing the responsibility to the victim, especially if the victims had sent the intimate images/videos consensually [ 25 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. With regard to moral justification, few studies have analyzed the specific mechanism of moral disengagement.…”

“…Although the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and cyberbullying have been recognized as an offense in several countries [ 32 , 66 , 67 ], many people may not be aware that it is a crime, but rather would identify it as ingenious behavior or a funny joke [ 17 ]. Adolescents and young adults believe themselves to be aware of both the gravity and cybercrime of cyberbullying [ 68 , 69 , 70 ].…”

The Dark Side of Being Connected: Image-Based Sexual Exploitation, Dark Personality Traits, and Coercion Perceptions

“…Participants were also allowed to skip any questions they did not want to answer, which resulted in men being less likely to complete the Propensity to Morally Disengage Scale (Moore et al, 2012). This may be due to social desirability, since men often score higher than women on scales of moral disengagement (Bandura et al, 1996;2001, as cited in Clemente et al, 2019Clemente et al, 2019;Pina et al, 2021), and the nature of the scale questions. While the study was anonymous, these measures were self-report, meaning there is a possibility of social desirability bias inflating or deflating scores and participants not reporting their perpetration for image-based sexual abuse or sexting coercion.…”

“…This could be done using a scale specific to sexting coercion or image-based sexual abuse, such as the new Moral Disengagement in Image-based Sexual Abuse scale (Pina et al, 2021), which assesses moral disengagement in that specific context instead of generally. This would help researchers understand how people justify this perpetration.…”