Sexual assault victims face a penalty for adjacent consent

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jordan, Jillian J.; Sommers, Roseanna
• 署名单位: Harvard University; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-14404
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2403609121
• 发表日期: 2024-08-20
• 关键词: RAPE; GENDER; attribution; attitudes; cognition

摘要

Across 11 experimental studies (n = 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term adjacent consent. Moreover, we illuminate a psychological mechanism contributing to this penalty: When a woman who provided no consent whatsoever is assaulted, people tend to see her as more moral than if she were not victimized (the Virtuous Victim Effect)-yet people do not extend the same moral elevation to victims who consented to sex- adjacent activity before they were assaulted. Adjacent consent plays a unique role in undermining the moral elevation of rape victims; respondents continue to elevate victims when, in the absence of adjacent consent, we introduce other information that makes the perpetrator seem less abhorrent or that makes the victim seem promiscuous, reckless, or sexually interested in her perpetrator. Furthermore, adjacent consent disqualifies rape victims from moral elevation in the eyes of a wide swath of respondents-including political liberals and undergraduates who, when no assault occurs, have no moral objection to (or even applaud) the victim's voluntary sexual intimacy. Our results thus illuminate how sexual assault victims may be penalized for adjacent consent by even progressive or sex- positive communities. Finally, we identify a potential real- world consequence of adjacent consent: using field data from over 180,000 students across 33 U.S. universities, we find evidence that victims are less likely to report their sexual assaults in cases involving adjacent consent.