Just Because She Doesn't Want to Doesn't Mean It's Rape: An Experimentally Based Causal Model of the Perception of Rape in a Dating Situation

The purpose of the present research is to investigate variables involved in deciding that rape has occurred and to test a model of the decision process of rape attribution in a dating situation. Male and female subjects were presented with a detailed description of a date in which the male used low...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social psychology quarterly 1983-09, Vol.46 (3), p.220-232
Main Authors: Shotland, R. Lance, Goodstein, Lynne
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attitude
Attribution/Attributions
Biological and medical sciences
Blame
Courtship
Date rape
Desire
Female
Gender roles
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Rape
Rape/Raped/Rapist/Rapists
Sex linked differences
Sexual violence
Social dating
Social psychology
Victimology
Violence against women
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Summary:The purpose of the present research is to investigate variables involved in deciding that rape has occurred and to test a model of the decision process of rape attribution in a dating situation. Male and female subjects were presented with a detailed description of a date in which the male used low or moderate force to obtain sex, after the female began to protest either early, moderately, or late during foreplay. Her protest consisted of just pleading or pleading plus physically struggling. The "true" experiment was analyzed by means of AOV and path analysis. Subjects were more likely to blame the woman and to perceive her as desiring sex with low force and late onset of protest. The man was viewed as more violent and the incident more likely to be viewed as rape when there was more force, more protest and earlier onset. Attitudes toward women was a significant predictor of all dependent variables and no overall sex differences were found. We concluded that the attributions of the male's violence and the female's desire for sex are difinitional components of rape and/or intervening variables, caused by the manipulated variables and in turn causing the perception of rape. Because experimental manipulations were shown to affect more than one cognition an argument was made for developing causal models including situational and cognitive intervening variables in predicting final attributions. The benefits of using "weak" manipulations were discussed.
ISSN:0190-2725
1939-8999
DOI:10.2307/3033793