How hindsight influences the attitude of teenagers towards victims of rape

The incidence of rape is unacceptably high during the last decade. The victim usually ends up feeling betrayed by the law. It is not uncommon that a rapist could be released within 24 hours on bail. It is also not uncommon that the rapist could commit the same crime while out on bail. In most case victims never report the crime because of this situation. In a true incident, an older man raped a teenager and when she reported the matter, she experienced rejection from her peers. She felt that although nobody said anything, at some level people felt that she was to be blamed for it. The kind of questions that people tend to ask was "what did you wear on that particular day?" So the attitude was that she must have done something to provoke that man to rape her. What is an attitude? According to Bram Opperheim in "Attitude measurement" Chapter 3, attitude is "an inner component of mental life that expresses itself directly or indirectly through more obvious processes such as stereotypes and beliefs, verbal statements or reactions or ideas and opinions, selective recall, anger or satisfaction, or some other emotion and in various overt aspects of behaviour." For that reason one can assume that attitude can directly determine bahaviour.

Attitudes is a very complex construct and the attitude that a person displays, should not be seen in isolation but rather as intertwined with other attitude domains. Attitudes forms patterns and from this patterns, a unique outlook on life. These patterns are not logic but "irrational-psychological," not only learned from previous experience but also from meaningful others in our lives. The question is why do others blame victims of rape?

According to the studies of Janoff-Bulman, etal (1985) Cognitive Biases in blaming the victim, the hindsight effect is responsible for blaming victims of rape. It means that people looking from outside in, are now in a position to pass judgment on a situation because they already knows the outcome of the situation. For this reason we assume that the victim should have foreseen the outcome of the situation, which is rape. In an experiment done by Fischhoff, 1975, Study 2, he use 24 male and 24 female undergraduate subjects in a study on "Person perception" to test the hindsight effect. All the respondents read an identical article about a rape, but only the last sentence differed and it reads," The next thing I knew he raped me. "The variables used were A2 X 2 X 4(outcome condition x gender x likelihood judgement). The outcome of the study was the following: "No main effects or interactions were found involving the gender subject." In other words there are no differences between male and females in their attitudes towards the victims of rape.

I belief that governments should introduce legislation to protect the rights of the victims of rape. A lot has been done in terms of harsh punishment for rapists, particularly towards children. Attitudes need to change especially towards the victims of rape.

Jonathan Mclean http://www.cjmebooks.net

About the Author

Jonathan has post Graduate Qaulufications in psychology and provides online business opporunities to people wanting to start an online business. You can visit his site at http://www.cjmebooks.net