Understanding Gender Differences in Rape Victim Blaming: The Power of Social Influence and Just World Beliefs

Abstract

Victims of sexual violence are frequently blamed by friends, family, or legal personnel in the aftermath of an attack, with men attributing greater blame on average than women. Victims' experiences of being blamed may generate a vicious cycle in which they are more likely to be blamed in the future. Moreover, just world beliefs (JWB) have been studied extensively as an underlying cognitive mechanism that predicts greater blame. Studies examining the influence of social support on blame have yet to examine the unique role of JWB on these attributions. The current study examined blame attribution of a fictional rape victim who received either positive, negative, or neutral support from friends and family in a sample of 383 undergraduate men and women. Individually, social support and JWB were both significant predictors of blame, and women were more influenced by social support than men; specifically, gender was a more salient predictor of blame toward the positively supported victim, suggesting that positive support received by friends and family may evoke a domino effect of support from other women. Conditional effects revealed that JWB were most influential on blame when responding to the positively supported victim. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Excusing and Justifying Rape Cognitions in Judgments of Sexually Coercive Dating Scenarios

“…At the implicit level, enhanced innocence judgments when the perpetrator paid the bill was explained by participants’ sex (specifically, being male). This conforms to established findings suggesting that men are more likely to find rapists less culpable (and to assign greater levels of blame to female victims) than women (Black & Gold, 2008; Grubb & Harrower, 2008; Pinciotti & Orcutt, 2017), but extends this existing body of work into the implicit domain.…”

It Won’t Happen to Me: An Examination of the Effectiveness of Defensive Attribution in Rape Victim Blaming

“… 1. Because this study was included as part of a larger project examining the impact of varying levels of social support provided to the victim by friends and family (i.e., positive, neutral, and negative; Pinciotti & Orcutt, 2017), social support was included as a covariate to control for any potential effects of the experimental manipulation. …”

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“…Но так как реальный мир сложнее, то страдания невинных жертв, особенно если они не могут быть легко смягчены (Rubin, Peplau, 1975), ставят под сомнение образ справедливого мира, и для того, чтобы его защитить, люди с высокими показателями ВСМ, считая, что каждый получает то, что заслужил, приписывают бjльшую вину жертвам изнасилования (Pinciotti, Orcutt, 2017) и проявляют меньше сочувствия мигрантам (Dalbert, Yamauchi, 1994), инвалидам (Furnham, 1995), бездомным (Guzewicz, Takooshian, 1992), бедным (Smith, 1985) и другим людям, оказавшимся в неблагоприятных обстоятельствах (Furnham, 2003;Furnham, Procter, 1989;Rubin, Peplau, 1975).…”

“…Результаты показали, что читавшие о поддержке жертвы осудили ее гораздо меньше, чем те, кто читал про отсутствие поддержки. Последующие исследования, в которых варьировались уровни поддержки и рассматривалась роль поддержки при учете других факторов (Brown, Testa, 2008;Pinciotti, Orcutt, 2017), подтвердили значимость влияния знания об отношении к жертве со стороны близких на оценку вины жертвы участниками исследования.…”