Survivors as Agents: How Linguistic Agency Impacts Support for Survivors and Perpetrators of Sexual Assault

Abstract

News media has become increasingly supportive of women who report sexual assault, potentially increasing public support for survivors. Support in the news typically involves granting survivors agency, but theories of morality would predict that linking agency to survivors over perpetrators may have deleterious effects, leading readers to blame survivors more and perpetrators less. We hypothesized that a linguistic pattern in which survivors are framed more agentically than perpetrators is prevalent in news media and influences who readers blame. Across 1,738 sentences from 494 politically varied news articles, a linguistic pattern emerged; in liberal sources, survivors were framed more agentically than perpetrators. We tested how this pattern shaped blame. College participants (N = 1,238) read sentences where survivors or perpetrators were agentic. Men who read sentences framing survivors (vs. perpetrators) agentically blamed perpetrators less. These findings demonstrate how supportive language can inadvertently reinforce victim-blame by causing people to think perpetrators are less blameworthy.

Keywords

gender social cognition sexual assault agency moral typecasting socialization

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