Narrative approach to understand people’s comprehension of acquaintance rape: The role of Sex Role Stereotyping

ABSTRACT

One of the most unreported crimes is acquaintance rape. This may be the result of people’s understanding of what rape is because of their rape script and their stereotypes of  victim characteristics. These judgements may be moderated by sex-role stereotyping (SRS). We utilised a narrative approach to understand low and high SRS participants’ rape scripts. Young-adult participants described what they believed a typical rape was, followed by describing an acquaintance rape and then what they believed the stereotypical victim of each crime would be. A narrative analysis was conducted on the data. We found that the blitz script is still held by 44% of low SRS and 47% of high SRS people despite 90% of rapes being committed by an acquaintance. While acquaintance rape scripts existed, the emotional imagery and content of these depended on participants level of SRS. Stereotypical victim characteristics also depended on SRS: those with high SRS were more likely to endorse rape myth ideals in describing victims than those with low SRS. These results have implications for educating people about what rape is so that victims might feel more confident in reporting rape.

KEYWORDS:

• Acquaintance rape
• sex-role stereotyping
• rape scripts
• victim characteristics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. It is possible for participants to interpret the word ‘typical’ in different ways with some participants inferring that the question referred to ‘most common’ whereas others might believe this meant ‘stereotypical.’ While acknowledging this, we expected most of our participants would use the common informal definition of the word (showing the characteristics expected of or popularly associated with a particular person or thing) when answering this question.

2. A median split was chosen to establish two groups: one relatively high in SRS and one relatively low in SRS. Since this is not a clinical measure, there is no pre-existing established cut-off determining high and low SRS. We could have chosen to use a mid-point on the scale (36), however, there were no participants who scored above 36.

3. These percentages do not add up to 100% because some narratives contained elements which were more generalised and did not fit into the two different scripts.

4. Fisher’s Exact test was used when the assumption of Chi-Square (that there are at least 5 responses in each cell) was violated.

5. In a preliminary analysis, we compared the results of the first 100 participants with the second 100 to establish if the presence of the narrative response questions impacted on the participants’ descriptions of the victim. There were no differences in the pattern of data for the first 100 participants to the second, t(19) = 0.07, p =.942.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jade L. Stirling

Jade L Stirling  - Completed her BSc (hons) Psychology and MSc Investigative Forensic Psychology from Bournemouth University.

Peter J. Hills

Peter J Hills - Completed his BSc (hons) Psychology, MSc Social Science Research Methods, and PhD (Psychology) from Cardiff University. Subsequently, he moved to take on his first lectureship at Anglia Ruskin University in 2008. He moved to Bournemouth University in 2014 as a Principle Lecturer before becoming an Associate Professor and Head of Department.

Liam Wignall

Liam Wignall - Is a lecturer in Psychology at Bournemouth University. Before joining BU in March 2018 as a Lecturer, he completed a PhD on non-heterosexual men's kink sexual practices at the University of Sunderland. He is a member of the International Academy of Sex Researchers, the Centre for Positive Sexuality, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.