Moral Foundations and Fear of Crime: A Gendered Analysis

• In Event: Fear of Crime: Considering Gender and Identity

Abstract

Social norms about gender roles have long promoted victim-blaming for female victims of sexual assault. Indeed, many women internalize these beliefs, viewing themselves as morally responsible for being “dirtied” by sexual assault. This may have important implications for understanding women’s fear of crime. According to Moral Foundations Theory, people experience moral intuitions—gut feelings about right and wrong—about various domains, including bodily purity. Because women are socialized to take responsibility for their own sexual victimizations, moral intuitions about purity may lead them to view sexual victimization a moral transgression. Thus, a woman who endorses Purity may intuitively view being sexually victimized as having done something wrong. To the extent that people desire to avoid engaging in morally wrong behaviors, women may strongly fear situations in which sexual victimization is likely. Given that women often view all victimization types as increasing the risk of sexual assault (Ferraro, 1996), Purity endorsement may thus have a broad impact on women’s fear of crime. Because gender norms do not assign blame to men for sexual activity, we further hypothesize that men’s fear of crime is unrelated Purity endorsement. We find support for these hypotheses using a national sample (N = 1,024).

Authors

• Jasmine R. Silver, University at Albany, SUNY

• Luzi Shi, University at Albany, SUNY