“What about the Rapists?” The Political Psychology of Women’s Policing Attitudes

ABSTRACT

Past research on crime and punishment attitudes has considered the effects of racial identity, racial animus, gender identity, and partisanship – or some combination of these factors. I focus on the role of a particular gendered emotional pathway: women’s fear of rape (FOR). Within the context of a racialized rape culture, I argue that FOR affects how women think about policing. Using Cooperative Election Study and FBI data from 2020, I explore the political determinants of FOR and how it shapes American women’s policing attitudes. Women’s fear of sexual violence is both partisan and racialized, with Republican and White women reporting the most fear. I demonstrate that White Democratic women who are more afraid of rape are more likely to feel safe around police officers, while Republican women feel safe around police regardless of their level of fear. Women who are more afraid of rape are less likely to support police reform efforts that aim to reduce police presence and militarization, or provide accountability for pas t wrongdoing. This link between FOR and support for masculinist institutions extends to attitudes on the military when its actions are framed as protectionary. The results reveal a disturbing paradox in which women who are most afraid of sexual violence are less willing to challenge state institutions that enact violence, including sexual violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual violence
• policing
• political psychology
• gender
• fear

Acknowledgments

I thank Nicholas Winter, Paul Freedman, and Justin Kirkland for extensive feedback on this project and for providing survey space on the 2020 Cooperative Election Study. I thank Denise Walsh for comments on the paper’s theoretical framework, and I thank Lisa Smilan for editing assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2023.2155387.

Notes

1. I follow organizations including the National Association of Black Journalists, American Psychological Association, and Center for the Study of Social Policy in capitalizing both Black and White. For a discussion of these capitalization choices, see Appiah (2020) and Nguyễn and Pendleton (2020).

2. Jackman (1994) describes the strategic paternalism that dominant groups use to coercively control marginalized groups as the “velvet glove.” A similar concept is the “patriarchal bargain”: the tradeoff women make between protection and political autonomy (Kandiyoti 1988).

3. Indeed, a predominantly White and Asian student sample failed to identify as rape an incident with a White perpetrator and woman of color victim (George and Martínez 2002). Similarly, Franklin and Garza (2021) find that race moderates the relationship between perceptions of responsibility and the likelihood of resource referral only when the rape victim is identified as a Black woman.

4. Gottschalk (2008, 242) explains how the political development of American feminism, rooted in the “liberal-equal rights tradition” rather than the socialist roots of European feminism, made it a less potent check on conservative law-and-order politics. She argues that these origins led women’s groups in the US to help, instead of hinder, punitive, conservative policies on crime.

5. In addition to their divergent fear of crime, women and men also have different perceptions of crime seriousness (Conrad et al. 2010; Kwan et al. 2002; Rossi et al. 1974). More generally, gender identity consistently affects fear of crime, with women being more afraid of gun violence and terrorism than men (Eichenberg, Lizotte, and Stoll 2022; Huddy et al. 2002).

6. For further details on the CES 2020 methodology, see Schaffner, Ansolabehere, and Luks (2021).

7. The UVa CES module was approved by the UVa Institutional Review Board for Social and Behavioral Sciences (Protocol 3822).

8. I thank Nicholas Winter for pretesting the 31 items of the FOR scale. The five items I use as a measure of FOR in this study were highly positively correlated and loaded primarily on one factor. I average the five items to create the scale. See Online Appendix Section A, Table A1, and Figure A1 for full question wording and an analysis of the FOR items.

9. McDonald, Coleman, and Brindley (2019) affirm the internal reliability and construct validity of the 31-item FOR measure.

10. Limited data were available for Alabama, Maryland and Pennsylvania in 2020. Rape cases arelisted according to the Uniform Crime Reporting definition of rape.

11. I present results from race/ethnicity-party groups with at least 10 respondents. Very few women of color in the sample identify as Republicans, in line with Junn's (2017) finding that women of color are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than are White women. Small numbers of women who identified as Native American, of two or more racial groups, or who selected “other,” limit the conclusions that could be drawn from this data. Further research on how women of color perceive sexual assault risk is crucial.

12. A paired t-test shows that the difference in means between Democratic and Republican White women is statistically significant; the difference in means between either Democratic and Independent or Republican and Independent White women, though, is not statistically significant.

13. I also consider differences in FOR levels by class (as measured by income level) and education, finding minimal differences. See Online Appendix Figure A2 and A3.

14. I use the same generation categorization as Pew (Dimock 2019), with the exception that CES data only includes respondents ages 18 and older, so it doesn’t include all of Generation Z. By birth year: Generation Z (1997–2002); Millennials (1981–1996); Generation X (1965–1980); Boomers (1946–1964); Silent Generation (1928–1945).

15. With the data at hand, it is impossible to disentangle whether these differences are a result of generation cohort or age itself, but the current elderly population is most afraid of rape and the current young adult population is least afraid of rape.

16. See Online Appendix Figure A4.

17. See Online Appendix Figure A5 for a comparison of men and women’s feelings of safety around police by partisanship.

18. See Online Appendix Table A3 for full models.

19. The independent category includes those who lean toward one party. Independent women who lean Democratic (β = 0.09, NS) or Republican (β = 0.12, NS) report feeling safer around police as their fear of rape increases.

20. Online Appendix Figure A6 shows mean feelings of safety around police officers by racial identity, for respondents of all genders.

21. This coding choice is not theoretically or normatively ideal, but helps with the small number of respondents in these racial/ethnic group. N = 25 for this group. See Online Appendix Table A4 for full models.

22. For Asian women, the association between FOR and feeling safe around police is negligible (N =15).

23. See Online Appendix Figure A7 and A8 for a comparison of police and criminal justice reform attitudes by respondent gender and party, and by race. Here I use a composite of all policing and criminal justice reform attitudes (ρ = 0.74). As expected, Democrats are most supportive of these reform efforts, while Republicans are least supportive. Accounting for partisanship, there are no meaningful gender differences. Black and Asian respondents are most supportive of police and criminal justice reforms relative to other racial/ethnic groups, with White respondents being the least supportive.

24. Results of full models available in Online Appendix Table A6.

25. I use feminine pronouns as this specific model is restricted to women, however, the same point extends to men (see Online Appendix Table A7).

26. It is a disturbing paradox that FOR informs women’s attitudes about using the military to protect allies, even as rape is a rampant problem within the military itself (Suris and Lind 2008; Weitz 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Smilan-Goldstein

Rachel Smilan-Goldstein is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Virginia Department of Politics. She holds an MA in Government and a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation project focuses on the linked politics of protecting White women and criminalizing Black men in the US. Using quantitative methods, she shows how narratives of racialized sexual violence shape how Americans think about politics and power.