“She Was Asking For It:” Women Who Slut-Shame Rape Victims

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Women who experience rape, are often slut-shamed, or derogated and rejected, even by other women. Whether women ostracize or support a rape victim might depend on their endorsement of gender values, and the victim’s response to the rape. Because traditional gender values stipulate that women should restrict their sexuality to control male sexual behavior, traditional women likely hold individual women accountable for sexual assault. Thus, they would see silence as the appropriate response to sexual assault, and “slut-shame” or degrade a woman who claims rape rather than accepting responsibility for enticing the man. In contrast, because feminist values support sexual freedom for women, feminist women likely would see a complaint rather than silence as an appropriate response to rape. We are in the process of testing these predictions. Undergraduate women are completing two online sessions. Session 1 includes measures of traditional and feminist beliefs. In Session 2, participants read about a young female undergraduate who was raped by a male undergraduate at a fraternity party. Participants are randomly assigned to read that the women either filed or did not file a police report. We predict that women high in traditional views will more likely regard the report as inappropriate and especially “slut-shame” the women who reported the rape by claiming she invited the man’s actions. In contrast, women high in feminist views will disagree with the negative comments and not “slut-shame” the woman. Moreover, they will favor the woman who reported rather than did not report the rape.