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Effect of perpetrator and victim ethnicity in perception of sexual assault : is it stereotyping?

University of British Columbia

Previous research examining the role of ethnicity in rape perception has primarily found that African-American perpetrators and victims are perceived more negatively than their Euro-Caucasian equivalents. These ethnic effects have largely been attributed to the hypersexual stereotype of African-Americans. This study is the first to test the stereotyping mechanism by comparing the perception of Euro-Caucasian perpetrator and victim to those of a hypo-sexualized ethnic group, the Chinese. 787 undergraduate students read and evaluated a vignette depicting sexual assault where the ethnicity of the perpetrator and victim were manipulated to be either Chinese or Euro-Caucasian. Our results indicated that Chinese and Euro-Caucasian victims were not viewed differently. Chinese participants also did not judge the Chinese and Euro-Caucasian perpetrator dissimilarly. In contrast, Euro-Caucasian participants deemed the Chinese perpetrator as more guilty than the Euro-Caucasian perpetrator when both were depicted as committing the exact same sexual assault. This finding is in stark contrast to what the stereotyping mechanism predicted and is instead consistent with another phenomenon: in-group bias. It appears that unfair treatment in the context of sexual assault does not solely affect visible minorities that are hypersexually stereotyped and cannot be buffered by benign sexual stereotypes. Future research in sexual assault perception should be encouraged by this study to explore outside of the stereotyping explanatory model for additional causes of ethnic effects on rape perception.

Text

2012-08-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43069

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/