Perceptions of Sexual Harassment Perpetrators and Victims: The Role of Gender, Identification, and Perspective-taking

Sexual harassment is a prevalent problem in many countries. Various factors such as gender and identification influence people's perceptions of perpetrators and victims of sexual harassment. This study aimed to investigate whether identification with the perpetrator or the victim mediates the relationship between gender and perceptions of the perpetrator and victim, and to investigate whether victim perspective-taking would moderate gender effects. Two hundred and three university students (65 males, 138 females) completed an online questionnaire. They were either instructed to take the victim's perspective, or given no instructions. All participants read the same scenario of a female university student's allegations of sexual harassment by a male university student and completed a questionnaire assessing their perceptions of both students, in terms of identification, attribution of blame, victim derogation, normalising actions, judgments of character, and punishment. It was hypothesised that males would identify more with the perpetrator than females, and thus have more positive evaluations of the perpetrator and more negative evaluations of the victim. It was also hypothesised that the perspective-taking manipulation would moderate gender effects, such that males in the perspective-taking condition would identify with the perpetrator less and have more similar views to females. Nevertheless this second hypothesis could not be explored due to the manipulation being unsuccessful. Gender was found to be significantly related to victim derogation, normalising actions, judgments of the victim's character, support of official warning and expelled. Mediation analyses revealed that perpetrator identification mediated the effect of gender on victim derogation, and suppressed the effect of gender on normalising actions. Future research can explore ways to change perpetrator identification so that there will be appropriate consequences for perpetrators, and greater understanding and help toward victims