Getting out of the shadow

Abstract

Abstract Background: Sexual violence (SV) and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) has become more. Different organizations have brought more attention to the issue. SV and sexual IPV as well as victim blaming can have serious health implications for people. The current paper explores the effect of perspective taking, either perpetrator or victim, on the evaluation of a sexual IPV scenario as coerced. And how gender and previous experience with SV influence this. Method: participants of the study (N= 789,) had to rate two of the same vignettes about sexual IPV on how coerced they perceived it. In one of the vignettes, they had to take the victim perspective and in the other the perpetrator. The study has a 2 (perspective taking, within subjects) by 2 (gender, between subjects) by 2 (previous SV, between subjects) multifactorial design. Perspective taking is measured within subjects, a repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted Results: A significant effect was found for perspective taking. Respondents rated the vignette as more coerced in the perpetrator perspective than the victim perspective. There was not an interaction effect between perspective, gender, and experience. There was a main effect for gender. Women rated the scenario as more coerced than men. No significance was found for the main effect of experience. Discussion/conclusion: Hypercorrection because of socially desirable answers could have influenced the evaluation of the scenario as more coerced by the perpetrator perspective. More research needs to be done on perspective taking, as well as the effect on victim blaming, and experience. The effect of gender on perspective taking does strengthen the scientific knowledge on the difference of evaluation between men and women.