Sexual Objectification Increases Rape Victim Blame and Decreases Perceived Suffering

Abstract

Sexual objectification changes the way people view women by reducing them to sexual objects—denied humanity and an internal mental life, as well as deemed unworthy of moral concern. However, the subsequent consequences of sexually objectifying others remain underresearched. In the current study, we examined the impact of objectification in the domain of sexual assault. Sixty British undergraduate students were recruited to complete an impression formation task. We manipulated objectification by presenting participants with either a sexualized or nonsexualized woman. Participants rated the woman’s mind and the extent to which they felt moral concern for her. They then learned that she was the victim of an acquaintance rape and reported victim blame and both blatant and subtle perceptions of her suffering. Consistent with prior research, sexualized women were objectified through a denial of mental states and moral concern. Further, compared with nonobjectified women, the objectified were perceived to be more responsible for being raped. Interestingly, although no difference emerged for blatant measures of suffering, participants tacitly denied the victims’ suffering by exhibiting changes in moral concern for the victim. We conclude that objectification has important consequences for how people view victims of sexual assault. Our findings reveal that sexual objectification can have serious consequences and we discuss how these might influence how victims cope and recover from sexual assault.

The Exonerating Effect of Sexual Objectification: Sexual Objectification Decreases Rapist Blame in a Stranger Rape Context

“…This paper aims to fill this gap. Beyond replication purposes, this study provides an important extension of the data collected in the UK by Loughnan et al (2013). Despite the vast rape perception literature that documents the effect of a variety of contextual and victim's characteristics on victim blame (for reviews, see Harrower 2008, 2009), much less is known regarding the factors that shift rapist blame.…”

“…A recent study integrated research that showed sexual objectification diminishes moral concern with the rape perception literature highlighting that target's clothing increases victim blame and examined whether sexual objectification increases victim blame due to diminished attribution of moral concern. In their study, Loughnan et al (2013) assigned 60 British undergraduates to either a non-objectification or a sexual objectification condition. Participants read a story depicting Laura, a female student (who was also a waitress and part-time model) in either a sexually objectified (wearing a bikini) or non-objectified manner (wearing jeans).…”

“…In sum, these results suggest that, in an acquaintance rape context, sexual objectification increases victim blame, whereas sexual objectification does not affect perpetrator blame. Loughnan et al (2013) study is informative regarding the relation between sexual objectification and acquaintance rape, it remains unclear how sexual objectification shapes the perception of stranger rape. This paper aims to fill this gap.…”

“…In cases of acquaintance rape (as in Loughnan et al 2013), victim blame is the easiest route to this end, given that the context is often perceived as ambiguous and is indeed commonly observed (for reviews, see Harrower 2008, 2009). In contrast, victim blame is very low in cases of stranger rape because the victim is the target of a fully random and unpredictable event.…”

“…As this example suggests, investigating how victim's sexual objectification shapes perceptions of rapist (and victim) blame among both sexes represents a crucial challenge because it has direct implications, such as the length of penalty a rapist may receive (see Viki et al 2004, for data collected among British undergraduates). In light of recent findings suggesting that sexual objectification of women leads to increased victim blame in cases of acquaintance rape among British undergraduate students (Loughnan et al 2013), this paper aims to extend the research by examining whether victim's sexual objectification is also likely to diminish rapist blame and to increase victim blame within a sample of Belgian male and female undergraduate students. Whereas previous studies focus on the perception of sexually objectified women (for recent reviews spanning several countries, see Gervais et al 2013a;Heflick and Goldenberg 2014), we suggest that sexual objectification may also shift the perception of targets who abused an objectified women and we consider this possibility in a novel context: stranger rape (i.e., a situation in which the perpetrator and the victim are unacquainted).…”