Is Rape-Related Self Blame Distinct From Other Post Traumatic Attributions of Blame? A Comparison of Severity and Implications for Treatment

Abstract

Rape treatment generally takes the form of standard trauma intervention, which may limit its ability to resolve rape-specific symptoms. For the sake of optimizing such treatment, the present study seeks to distinguish specific post-rape symptoms from those observed following other forms of trauma, particularly in respect to self-blame and related PTSD. Given typical societal victim-blaming following rape, self-blame is expected to be considerably more extreme among survivors of rape than in other victims, and predictive of relatively elevated post-trauma symptoms. Three hundred and four participants completed measures of blame attribution and PTSD, substantiating the hypotheses. Implications for rape treatment and social change are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• PTSD
• rape
• rape treatment
• self-blame

Notes

*significant at the 0.05 level, **significant at the 0.01 level, ***significant at the 0.00 level. ANOVA-analysis of Variance.

*significant at the 0.05 level, **significant at the 0.01 level ***significant at the 0.00 level.

*significant at the 0.05 level, **significant at the 0.01 level, ***significant at the 0.00 level.