A Proposal to Examine Student Perceptions on Marital Rape

Marital rape is a topic of little discussion, although it is recognized as a crime in all fifty states and occurs in 10-14% of all marriages (Martin, Taft & Resick, 2006). Historically, marital rape had no legal punishment until the 1970s Women’s Movement (Hasday, 2000). The legal history of marital rape may have some influence on marital attitudes today as wives were once seen as property of their husbands and sex was a part of the “mutual matrimonial consent.” Past studies on marital rape have shown that participants’ beliefs of whether a non-consenting sexual act was considered rape or not depended on the victim-offender relationship, with a spousal relationship leading to the lowest belief that the act was rape (Kirkwood & Cecil, 2001). The current study seeks to assess more recent attitudes of marital rape and to assess the influence of sociocultural variables on victim blaming and rape myth acceptance. Participants will be randomly assigned to read either a scenario between a man and woman describing an act of marital rape, an act of acquaintance rape, or no rape. Experimental participants will respond to dependent measures of victim and perpetrator culpability and rape myth acceptance. Control participants will only complete the dependent measure of rape myth acceptance. All participants will also complete measures of sociocultural attitudes related to victim blame and rape myth acceptance: The 28-item Role Attitudes in Marriage Scale (Jacobson, 1951), and The Ambivalent Sexism Scale (Glick & Fiske, 1996). It is expected that female participants in the experimental conditions will be less likely to blame the victim and will report lower levels of rape myth acceptance than men in the experimental conditions. It is also expected that participants who read about a marital rape case will assign more victim blame than participants who read about an acquaintance rape case. We also expect that higher levels of conservative marital attitudes and higher levels of ambivalent sexism will be associated with higher levels of victim blaming and rape myth acceptance