The public’s judgment of sex trafficked women: Blaming the victim?

Abstract

A victim-centered approach to fighting sex trafficking can result in apprehension and prosecution of traffickers and offer needed services to survivors. However, law enforcement officers frequently arrest sextrafficking survivors for prostitution in accordance with state law. This study examined the psychology of public reactions and judgments of sex-trafficking survivors demonstrating the importance of situational factors, cognitive stereotypes, and moral emotions. Using Stereotype Content Modeling to measure the stereotypes that 762 community members held about prostitutes, we found shared stereotypes that were low in competence (i.e., capable and skilled) and warmth (i.e., good-natured and friendly). These participants later read modified case facts from United States v. Bell (United States v. Bell, 761 F.3d (8th Cir. 2014)) that varied survivor history of prostitution, vulnerability, and prostitution as a subsequent livelihood. Participants who stereotyped prostitutes as low in warmth and competence were the ones most certain police should arrest the survivor. Moral emotion analyses further showed that a survivor with no prior prostitution history and who came from a nonvulnerable background invoked disgust and contempt, which predicted a higher certainty of the arrest. Moral emotions fully mediated the relationship between the interacting case facts and arrest certainty for the trafficking survivor. Future directions and policy implications are discussed. Public Significance StatementParticipants who stereotyped prostitutes as low in warmth and competence were more certain police should arrest the survivor of sex trafficking for violating prostitution laws as were those who read about a survivor with no prior prostitution history and who came from a nonvulnerable background, in part, as a result of the disgust and contempt which people felt toward the survivor. The results suggest that efforts to educate the public about victim-centered approaches to sex trafficking could lead to healthier outcomes for the survivors as well as more effective prosecution of traffickers.

Stereotypes and emotions as moderators of risk and race in judgments about juvenile probationers.

“…In rich countries with greater income inequality (e.g., the United States), “poor” people were seen as less competent and “rich” people were seen as less warm. Closer to the purpose of the current investigation, Wiener et al (2021) adapted the SCM method to measure stereotypes and stigma held against prostitutes to determine how those stereotypes would moderate criminal liability judgments in cases of sex trafficking. In Phase 1 of a two-phase experiment, Wiener et al (2021) measured societal perceptions toward the 12 groups that Fiske et al (2002) used in their original SCM model but added prostitute and sex worker categories, both of which also fell into the low competence/low warmth quadrant.…”

“…One of the primary goals of the present study was to use SCM theory to establish moderating factors that might alter judgments about youthful offenders. Wiener et al’s (2021) study was able to separate racial prejudice and stereotypes by manipulating race independent of the measured stereotypes to establish the causal contribution of racial information on judgments of dangerousness and adherence to probation. The current research posits that reliance on stereotypes might be an important bias to which lay people fall prey and that probation officers need to avoid.…”

What’s reasonable? An experimental test of the reasonable officer standard.

“…Moreover, 644 (99.5%) participants answered all five general attention checks correctly. Due to concerns with differential treatment effects caused by artificially induced attrition when excluding participants for failing such checks (Aronow et al., 2019; Shadish et al., 2002), we followed the procedures of other studies that use crowdsourcing data (Holloway & Wiener, 2021; Wiener et al., 2021) and included the full sample ( N = 647) in all subsequent analyses. However, to statistically control for any differences related to answering these questions incorrectly, the primary analyses detailed below included a dichotomous control variable (passed or failed checks) coded for passing all the manipulation and attention checks (coded 0, n = 528) or failing at least one of them (coded 1, n = 119; see materials available on the OSF website for results of the passed or failed checks variable on officer reasonableness judgments for both experiments).…”

“…However, to statistically control for any differences related to answering these questions incorrectly, the primary analyses detailed below included a dichotomous control variable (passed or failed checks) coded for passing all the manipulation and attention checks (coded 0, n = 528) or failing at least one of them (coded 1, n = 119; see materials available on the OSF website for results of the passed or failed checks variable on officer reasonableness judgments for both experiments). This approach, which we also followed in Experiment 2, preserves random assignment; thereby, maintaining internal validity while controlling for treatment effect estimates confounded with manipulation and attention check failures (see Aronow et al., 2019; Wiener et al., 2021).…”

“…Thus, 122 (12.6%) additional participants were excluded for having reported a felony conviction on their record, and 50 (5.2%) for not being a fluent English-speaker. We followed prior published crowdsourcing studies in developing the rules to remove these participants before any further data analysis (Holloway & Wiener, 2021;Vardsveen & Wiener, 2021;Wiener et al, 2021;Wiener & Vardsveen, 2018). before them based solely on the evidence and arguments presented at trial (see materials on the OSF website).…”