Description
Sexual assaults on college campuses are ubiquitous despite the well-intentioned interventions, resources, and crime alerts that universities issue to, hopefully, increase safety. Often these interventions, resources, and alerts intentionally or unintentionally promote system-justifying ideologies that cast blame for the crime on survivors rather than perpetrators of sexual assault. For example, a crime alert might imply that a sexual assault occurred because the survivor was drinking, was walking alone at night, or was wearing revealing clothes. We investigated the impact of victim-blaming responses to sexual assault on how survivors are stereotyped and how safe people feel. Specifically, we focused on victim-blaming language in the text of crime alerts issued following the report of a sexual assault because (1) these types of crime alerts must be issued by universities by law and (2) universities can easily change how they write these alerts without incurring any additional costs while still complying with federal law. Among three distinct samples (registered Florida voters, undergraduates, U.S. based MTurk workers), we found that participants who read or listened to crime alerts with victim-blaming rather than non-victim-blaming language reported that survivors of sexual assault were associated with low intelligence (all samples) and high promiscuity (college undergraduates and U.S. based MTurk workers). Participants also felt safer when crime alerts included victim-blaming rather than non-victim-blaming language. These feelings of safety were facilitated in part, because participants reported that society believed that survivors were less intelligent (U.S. based MTurk workers). We discuss future directions and implications for the composition of public crime alerts and their consequences for safety on college campuses. Materials and data available online (https://osf.io/acnqb/?view_only=4c9dd1c7abcd4a6bbd2c68e8412fcbdd).
| Date made available | 2020 |
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