Shades of Sexual Violence: How Partisanship Affects Detection and Reporting

• In Event: Navigating Healthcare Services and Resources

Abstract

This paper presents research on the capacity of victims to detect and report sexual violence, and how this is affected by factors such as partisanship, the identity of the perpetrator, and the type of sexual violence experienced. Despite formal gender equality advancing globally, gender-based violence, and sexual violence more particularly, remain an important epidemic which is a threat particularly to women’s safety, integrity health and a fundamental human rights question. A central problematic of the sexual violence epidemic is whether the population can accurately identify episodes of the phenomena as such. Research on rape perceptions indicates that victims have a hard time detecting the violence they experience, especially under particular conditions like who the aggressor is or the use of force. The research expands on previous literature by examining victims' capacity to detect sexual violence generally, and not just rape, and by distinguishing between several forms of sexual violence that have not been explored before, including attempted rape, coercion and public and digital-based episodes. The study also provides a novel argument and empirical data to show that there is an important yet overlooked variable: partisanship. The authors argue that feeling closer to political parties that deny the existence of gender-based violence hinders the identification that this is the case. In this sense, they tackle the question of sexual violence from an inter-disciplinary perspective, by bridging the fields of criminal studies -by measuring victimisation perception and reporting behavior-, gender studies -by re-conceptualising sexual violence- and political science -by incorporating partisanship and identity politics perspective.

The study is based on the largest worldwide survey on sexual violence ever conducted, with over 1 million responses. The survey was distributed through online social media and partnered with a network of social media influencer activists, allowing the survey to access populations that are not commonly reached through conventional survey methods across Spanish speaking countries. Before asking about specific experiences of sexual violence, the survey first asked respondents whether they identify themselves as a victim of sexual violence or not, as well as their reporting behavior, including telling the sexual violence episodes to closer ones and the police. This allows the researchers to predict under which conditions individuals identify themselves as a victim or not.

The survey re-conceptualizes sexual violence through a gendered and feminist perspective and is able to detect previously overlooked forms of sexual violence. It also offers a methodological contribution by capturing sexual violence in a more diverse way than through conventional survey methods, which often ask for a limited set of episodes and fail to capture the broad array of sexual violence experiences.

The results of the study show that many sociodemographic characteristics only have a moderate impact over self-identification as a victim. However, the findings support the hypothesis that partisanship has the largest effect over identifying oneself as a victim. Specifically, individuals that feel close to the far-right reduce the probability of identifying themselves as victims by 25%. Sexual violence type, the perpetrator’s identity and frequency also play an important role too, but the magnitude is smaller than with partisanship.
Overall, the study has important implications for the study of sexual violence, victim identification and victim reporting behavior, and speaks to the recent debates over feminist awakening and gender backlash. The authors suggest that their findings will be useful in creating more effective policies for addressing sexual violence, by understanding the factors that affect victims' ability to identify and report the violence they have experienced. As stems from this research, it is of particular importance addressing political and ideological factors when developing policies and programs aimed at addressing sexual violence as well as being more responsive to the diverse experiences of victims and considering the various forms of sexual violence that people may experience.

Authors

• Alberto Lopez Ortega, VU Amsterdam

• Leire Rincon