The connection between rape perceptions, gender role attitudes, and victim-perpetrator acquaintance was examined. One hundred fifty Israeli students rated their perceptions of the victim, the perpetrator, the situation, and the appropriate punishment, after reading scenarios in which rape was committed by a neighbor, an ex-boyfriend, and a current life partner. Significant negative correlations were found between gender-role attitudes and four measures of rape perceptions. "Traditionals" minimized the severity of all rapes more than "Egalitarians" did. As the acquaintance level increased, there was a greater tendency to minimize the severity of the rape, in the perceptions of the victim, the situation, and the punishment; the situation was characterized less as rape, and was perceived as less violating of the victim's rights and less psychologically damaging. Women tended to have more egalitarian attitudes than men did, and women were less likely to minimize the severity of the rape in the measures of perceptions of the situation and the appropriate punishment.KEY WORDS: gender role attitudes; victim-perpetrator acquaintance; rape perceptions.Attributions of responsibility to victim and perpetrator, assessments of motives, and psychological consequences all affect perceptions of the severity of rape. Minimization of the severity of rape can be expressed by the refusal to label the situation as rape, or by characterizing it as not being psychologically damaging or as not violating the victim's rights. Minimization of the severity of rape is also connected to judgments of responsibility, and can be expressed by attributing more blame to the victim and less blame to the perpetrator.In her social-historical analysis of rape, Brownmiller (1975) claimed that rape should not be viewed as a deviant sexual act, but as an aggressive and antisocial tool for men's control over women. She asserted that rape myths are maintained in order to support and justify male supremacy and social power. In line with a sociocultural perspective of use