'Slut-shaming' isn't the only reason people blame rape victims

There's a widespread belief that society has a default tendency to "blame the victim" -- to minimise injustice by suggesting the injured party somehow deserved the harm. But psychological research has shown that people often perceive victims in the precisely opposite way: as being especially morally virtuous because of what they've endured.

In a 2021 study led by one of us (Dr Jordan), the researchers asked participants to imagine a woman whose friend had stolen her iPad. People tended to see the woman as more moral and trustworthy than they did an identical woman who hadn't been victimised. Notably, they did not grant the woman the same moral character boost when her iPad was destroyed in an earthquake. Only being the victim of wrongdoing cast a moral glow.

This "moral halo" effect has been observed for victims of all sorts of wrongdoing: theft, verbal abuse, medical misconduct. While it may seem irrational (isn't it your own behavior that determines how moral you are?), the moral halo effect probably serves an important social function, making communities more likely to rally around victims and to punish their wrongdoers.

But there are certain situations in which people do seem more inclined to blame the victim. Perhaps the classic case is a rape that is preceded by consensual sexual activity like kissing or foreplay between the victim and the perpetrator. Here -- even when the victim ultimately and unambiguously refuses consent -- she is often seen as complicit in her assault.

"Slut-shaming" seems like an obvious explanation: When the victim is judged harshly for her consensual sexual activity, she may be seen as less moral and thus less deserving of support.

But in research published last month, we found that slut-shaming is not necessarily the main explanation for why people view the victims of such assaults less sympathetically. This finding has important implications for how society should educate people about rape.

In a series of studies involving more than 12,000 participants, we presented people with a description of a sexual assault like this:

Alice, a college student, is at a fraternity party. She's flirting with an acquaintance, Michael, who lives at the frat. He invites her to his room, and they begin hooking up. But when Alice says she wants to stop, Michael ignores her verbal and physical protestations and violently forces sex with her.

Our participants acknowledged that Alice was raped. But she did not receive the same boost in moral status typically granted to other sorts of victims. By contrast, when we described a sexual assault that was physically identical to Alice's but occurred out of the blue -- with no prior consensual activity -- the moral halo effect returned in full force: Our participants perceived Alice as more virtuous than someone just like her who had not been raped.

So why wasn't this a simple case of slut-shaming? Because of what we found when we looked at how participants judged Alice's voluntary sexual activity if she was not assaulted. When no sexual assault occurred, we found -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- that politically conservative and older adults judged Alice negatively for engaging in a casual hookup, but politically liberal and younger respondents had no moral objection to her one-night fling.

Strikingly, however, all these groups -- liberals, conservatives, young adults, older adults, and both men and women -- viewed Alice less sympathetically when she voluntarily hooked up with Michael before she was raped.

This finding suggests that victim-blaming in these cases is not necessarily about people's disapproval of risky, unwholesome or "slutty" behavior (though it can be about that, too). It appears that human beings have a psychological tendency, after seeing consent granted in one situation, to treat that consent as "carrying over" into an adjacent situation -- even when they explicitly acknowledge that it hasn't.

This psychological tendency may translate to less community support and solidarity for certain victims, which potentially makes those victims less likely to report assaults. Our analysis of a 2019 survey of more than 180,000 students at 33 colleges and universities in the United States affirms this concern: We found evidence that victims of sexual assault were less likely to report incidents that began consensually.

An important insight follows from our findings. Although society has made marked progress in recognising the value of sexual autonomy, the challenge is bigger than we thought. It is true that "No means no," regardless of what has transpired beforehand. Society must continue to teach this lesson. But unfortunately, our research suggests that this message is harder to internalize than you might think, even for those who are ideologically disposed to want to internalize it.

Hopefully, by communicating the subtle yet powerful ways our minds process issues of consent, we can begin to address the barriers that prevent us from fully supporting all victims of sexual assault.