The paper describes the construction of a 25-item Attitudes toward Rape Victims Scale (ARVS) designed to assess favorable and unfavorable attitudes with particular emphasis on victim blame, credibility, deservingness, denigration, and trivialization. Normative data are presented as well as the results of various psychometric analyses based on four independent studies and a variety of samples including university students, doctors, lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and police in Singapore, and university students in the United States. These analyses confirm the ARVS's reliability, validity and cross-cultural suitability. As attitudes toward rape victims have been implicated in the quality of victim care in legal, medical, and social spheres, it is proposed that the ARVS provides a valuable tool for applied research in victimology.
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