No abstract

This article deconstructs the shame of sexual victimization by highlighting shame as a culturally mediated response triggered by threats to victims' gendered selves. An exploration of victims' narratives from the National Crime Victimization Survey reveals that 13% of respondents who experience rape or sexual assault express shame (i.e., self-blame, humiliation, or fear of public scrutiny) in their narratives. Looking separately at women's and men's shame narratives, the study delineates the cultural ideologies regarding gender and sexuality that contribute to victims' definitions of their situations as shameful, and ultimately, to their reluctance to report incidents to the police.

Drawing its examples from National Crime Victimization Survey narratives, this article proposes a theoretical framework for elucidating victims’ non-reporting accounts, the rationales that victims use to justify why they do not report sexual victimization to police. The framework delineates four account types—denying criminal intent, denying serious injury, denying victim innocence, and rejecting a victim identity—that each problematize one or more critical elements of real and reportable crime. By delineating victims’ accounts of unwanted sexual incidents, along with each account’s distinct neutralization strategies, non-reporting rationales, and cognitive benefits, this article contributes theoretically to discourses on unreported and unacknowledged rape, as well as to a broader literature on non-reported crime.

This study examines men’s sexual victimization experiences in the United States using a nationally representative sample of victim narratives from the National Crime Victimization Survey. An analysis of men’s incidents reveals many similarities to women’s rapes and sexual assaults as well as some rather gendered differences, particularly in regard to offender sex, victims’ willingness to report to officials, and a few uniquely masculine ways in which some men frame their experiences. The study begins an important exploration of men’s descriptions of their sexual victimization experiences and responses and encourages future empirical and theoretical research of this understudied population of victims.

An examination of 944 victim narratives from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) finds that one in five women who reveal an incident of sexual victimization to the NCVS excuse or justify their situations, largely by drawing on social vocabularies that suggest male sexual aggression is natural, normal within dating relationships, or the victim's fault. The study's findings substantiate the influence that rape myths and gender stereotypes have on victims' perceptions of their own unwanted sexual situations and demonstrate the ways in which cultural language delimits victims' recognition of sexual victimization as crime and inhibits reporting to the police.