| Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools. |
DOI: 10.1177/0886260504269094 The Impact of Past Sexual Experiences on Attributions of Responsibility for Rape
University of Illinois at Chicago
University of North Florida, Jacksonville Two factors potentially affect observersattributions of responsibility to a rape survivor: how closely they identify with the survivor and how much they adhere to rape myths. To assess the impact of these factors, 157 female college students categorized by their sexual assault history and by their acceptance of rape myths, evaluateda sexual assault scenario. It was hypothesized that previously victimized participants would attribute less blame, and that those participants who self-identify as rape survivors would view the assault as rape more often than other participants. Neither hypothesis was supported. As expected, those who scored higher on the Rape Myths Acceptance Scale(RMAS) blamed the victim more and were less likely to believe rape had occurred. Only one subscale of the RMAS, Adversarial Sexual Beliefs, was consistently associated with participantsevaluation of the scenario, suggesting that this dimension may be especially important to understanding an observers assessment of rape.
Key Words: rape myths attribution of blame defensive attribution hypothesis adversarial sexual beliefs
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
||||||||||||
