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Female Victims Of Sexual Assault

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Throughout my five weeks at the Campus Assault Resources and Education (C.A.R.E.), I observed and discussed a problem that I wanted to research more. The problem that I observed was the stigma of male rape and sexual assault victims. There are programs established at the C.A.R.E. office that are geared towards men and the entire staff is making efforts to get away from gendered victim and perpetrator type language, but I still observed that most statistics used in presentations only talked about women sexual assault rates and majority of men that came up to the booth during freshman and transfer orientation did not know how they could get involved or were impacted by this program. One student in particular, came up to me and asked me how…show more content…
This stems from the stereotypes concerning male sex roles, sexual motivation, and sexual functioning. In our society, sexual assault is a major social problem and researchers are beginning to delve more into the topic. This is because there are significant psychological problems that happen after an assault. One problem is that not much scientific research has been done that has been attentive to male victims and their needs. The researchers hypothesized that a male victim of female sexual assault would be judged as more likely to have encouraged or initiated the assault, less likely to be able to be forced to have sex, more likely to have enjoyed the interaction because of the physical reaction, and less likely to experience high stress from the event.
In order to demonstrate this bias, the study selected 77 male subjects and 89 female subjects from the University of Washington’s introductory level psychology courses who volunteered to participate in this research. Each subject received a booklet containing two case descriptions and rating forms and the true purpose of the study was concealed. The sex of the victim and sex of the assailants were systematically varied in a 2 x 2 design. After the participants read the case, there was a “Juror Questionnaire” designed to measure degree of responsibility and affective responses attributed to the victim and assailants, as well as judgment of remorse and punitiveness toward the assailants.
A 2 (Sex of Victim) x
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