Open Collections

Stewart, Jayme

University of British Columbia

Despite being the second most common form of violent crime in Canada, sexual assault is one of the lowest reported violent crimes. When survivors do report to family, friends, and police, they are commonly disbelieved or dismissed —particularly when they do not conform to expectations of how a survivor should look or act. Accordingly, understanding stereotypes about women who have experienced sexual assault is an important factor to improving responses to sexual assault disclosures. Though research indicates that those with attitudes reflecting rape myth acceptance and sexism are less likely to believe a sexual assault disclosure, little is known about how these attitudes manifest into stereotypes of sexual assault survivors. Using a novel, data driven technique that allows for the estimation of assumption and bias-free images, this study examined how rape myth acceptance and sexism affect mental representations of sexual assault survivors within an American context. Ninety-six participants completed a 400-trial reverse correlation (RC) task as well as measures related to rape myth acceptance and sexism. Ninety-six individual-level CIs were generated by aggregating the visual noise in each RC trial, which provided a visual representation of each participants’ stereotype of a sexual assault survivor’s appearance. An additional independent sample of 86 participants each rated 30 of the individual-level CIs on various appearance variables, including trustworthiness, vulnerability, and femininity. Results demonstrated that each attitude variable was negatively associated with perceptions of vulnerability, while hostile sexism and the ‘she lied’ rape myth were negatively related to trustworthiness. Additionally, women produced mental representations that were perceived as more vulnerable than men. After accounting for the role of gender, rape myth acceptance emerged as the sole predictor of vulnerability ratings. Taken together, this research expands our current understanding of perceptions of women who have experienced sexual assault. And, importantly, by identifying how attitudes are related to disbelief of survivors, this research may serve as a stepping-stone towards improving responses to sexual assault disclosures.

Text

2023-06-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85177

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCO

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