When a corporation rapes: perceptions of rape in civil court for corporate defendants

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the coupling of poor outcomes for rape victims in criminal court and the widening scope of legal responsibility for sexual assault has prompted plaintiffs to file civil suits for rape against corporations. Unfortunately, we know little about juror perception of civilly litigated rape against corporate defendants and most jury research involving corporate defendants concerns non-sexual injury cases (e.g. premises liability, automobile accidents). With the increasing number of corporations being sued civilly for rape, we need to understand how civil juries perceive these cases. The present study investigated mock jurors’ perceptions of a fictional civil rape trial against a hotel. Community members (N = 155) read one of three trial summaries: Civil rape trial against the alleged perpetrator, civil rape trial against a hotel, or criminal rape trial. Results indicate females have higher pro-plaintiff judgments than males in civil court, perceptions of greed typically associated with civil litigation apply to rape, and favorable plaintiff decisions are most likely against a corporate defendant. Also, mental models suggest mock jurors conceptualize criminal and civil rape cases against an individual similarly. We discuss our results in terms of psychological, legal and practical expectations when suing for rape.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil rape
• corporate defendant
• mediation
• mock jury
• mental models

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anne Lippert http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3920-1582

Notes

1 Tolling provisions are suspensions of certain aspects of a statute. For example, some states have a tolling provision called ‘delayed discovery.’ Delayed discovery refers to a victim’s repressed memory about an event. The statute is said to be ‘un-suspended’ when a victim consciously recalls that sexual abuse has occurred.

2 Kentucky state law defines the following: Sexual intercourse is the penetration of the sex organ of one person, no matter how slight, by another person’s body or by a foreign object manipulated by another. First degree rape is sexual intercourse with someone by forcible compulsion, or with someone who isn’t capable of consenting to the act because they are either physically helpless or less than 12 years old (Kentucky Revised Statutes section 510.040–510.060: Rape.)

3 City block distance between any two points in n dimensional space is the sum of the n absolute differences between their coordinates along each dimension. For example, in two-dimensional space the city block distance between point a with coordinates (x_a, y_a) and point b with coordinates (x_b, y_b) is |x_a − x_b| + |y_a − y_b|. Conceptually, this is similar to the way one moves in a city (block wise) by going around buildings instead of straight through them.