“I Know It When I See It”: Recent Victimization and Perceptions of Rape

Abstract

This study examined various individual differences that influence perceptions of sexual assault (SA), specifically focusing on participants’ self-reported recent experiences of rape or sexual coercion. Female college students (N = 214) read 16 short SA encounter vignettes, indicated whether what they read constituted rape, and completed individual difference measures. Results indicated that participants who confirmed a recent history of SA endorsed rape myths to a greater degree, held more adversarial sexual beliefs, reported higher levels of sociosexuality, and were less likely to construct the SA encounters as rape when compared with women who do not report recent SA or coercion. Further analyses showed that these variables interacted to predict rape perception in ambiguous SA vignettes, as identified by the participants. These findings illuminate some of the impacts of SA and coercion on women and provide suggestions for future research to further examine the relationship between recent assault history and perceptions of rape.

Keywords

rape sexual assault individual differences victimization

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