Mechanism of Bystander-Blaming

Abstract

Contemporary victimology recognizes that an understanding of the mechanism of blaming requires a comprehensive approach that includes the victim, the offender, and the bystander. However, most of the existing research on blaming focuses on the victim and the offender, ignoring the issue of bystander-blaming. This study highlights the bystander and investigates bystander-blaming by exploring some theoretical explanations, including counterfactual thinking, defensive attribution, and gender differences. The study included 363 young male and female participants, who read vignettes describing the behavior of the victim and the bystander in a rape scenario and answered questions regarding bystander-blaming. The results show that both counterfactual thinking and defensive attribution play a role in bystander-blaming. This article addresses the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

It Won’t Happen to Me: An Examination of the Effectiveness of Defensive Attribution in Rape Victim Blaming

“…More recently, defensive attribution has been used to explain attributions of blame toward bystanders of sexual victimization. Levy and Ben-David (2015) used vignettes with a sample of undergraduate students in which a woman is raped by a male offender after not being accompanied by a female friend. The authors found that participants were more likely to judge the bystander who was less personally similar to them and, similar to studies examining victim blame, bystander blame was greater from male participants than female participants.…”

The Questionnaire of Intention to Help in VAW Cases (QIHVC): Development and preliminary results

“…Previous questionnaires for the evaluation of bystander response were used as a starting point in the design of the QIHVC (e.g., Banyard et al, 2005 , 2007 , 2014 ; Burn, 2009 ; Banyard and Moynihan, 2011 ; Coker et al, 2011 ; McMahon et al, 2014 , 2017 ; Katz et al, 2015 ; Levy and Ben-David, 2015 ; Jouriles et al, 2016 ; Cinquegrana et al, 2018 ; Gracia et al, 2018 ; Bush et al, 2019 ; Johnson et al, 2019 ; León, 2020 ; Franklin and Garza, 2021 ; León et al, 2022 ), in particular those that had defined case-scenarios (e.g., Katz et al, 2015 ; Levy and Ben-David, 2015 ; Cinquegrana et al, 2018 ; León, 2020 ; León et al, 2022 ).…”

“…These types of tools have been widely used to study the perception of sexual assault ( Papendick and Bohner, 2017 ), and also to study bystander response in these cases. To that end, for example, Katz et al (2015) , designed a scenario to describe a high-risk situation of sexual assault in a party, alternating the variable of knowing or not knowing the victim; Levy and Ben-David (2015) presented the description of a rape, alternating the variables of age and personal circumstances of the victim at the moment of the aggression; and Franklin and Garza (2021) described an intimate encounter between two students which ended in sexual assault, alternating the variables of the relationship (how well they knew each other) between the aggressor and the victim and the victim’s skin color. Other studies of bystander response in the case of IPVAW have used various scenarios.…”

“…Related to the present study, as previously noted, the methodology involving case scenarios is a useful contrast to the study involving bystander response in the case of sexual violence (e.g., Katz et al, 2015 ; Levy and Ben-David, 2015 ; Franklin and Garza, 2021 ) as well as IPVAW (e.g., Rincón-Neira, 2017 ; Cinquegrana et al, 2018 ; León et al, 2022 ). For this reason we decided to use this evaluation strategy in our research.…”

Male Neighbors’ Behavior: Bystander Effect in Domestic Violence Cases

“…Inasmuch as every human's suffering involves bystanders (Levy & Ben-David, 2015), community members are very potential to be one, including in the case of DV. This role as potential bystander should be empowered to prevent and to eliminate DV.…”