Think Exercise Three
Rape has been historically defined as penis, vaginal, or penetration committed by force without consent by the male. With the marital exemption at hand, this stated that a man cannot be charged with raping his wife. Although, as time progressed there was a new definition given to this term. By replacing the term rape with sexual assault, it eliminated the marital exemption by 1993. This type of rape is common among ten to fourteen percent of those women who are married, and in most cases it’s hard to deem whether a situation that occurred between both spouses was rape or not. The cause for marital rape ranged from all types of issues from alcohol use to psychological issues. In this case I have chosen two empirical articles that experiment’s on how people’s perception of marital rape varies when a specific situation is outline for the participants of the experiment.
The two articles I chose to represent the gruesome crime of marital rape focuses on judgment of this crime assembled from a third party perspective. In the first empirical research, The Influence of Length of Marriage and Fidelity Status on Perception of Marital Rape, The question issues is ; to what extent does the length of the marriage or the wife’s faithfulness to the husband influence the perception of responsibility or trauma in marital rape. In the other research article, The Effects of Participants Sex, Victim Dress, And Traditional Attitudes on Casual Judgment for Marital Rape Victims, the writers wanted to investigate whether the manner in which a victim of marital rape is dressed would influence participants ratings of her responsibility and to determine the influence of participant sex and attitudes on victims responsibility.
In both of the research chosen on marital rape, 160 participants were used, In the experiments that dealt with victim’s dress they use 50 percent males and 50 percent females in order to see how the perception of marital sex varies between genders. In the research directed towards infidelity of the victim, all the student were female students from a midsized Midwestern university. In this research they gave a scenario in which marital rape between a husband and wife was described. They avoided the word rape to avoid any bias associated with the phrase and changed the length both spouses had been married in each scenario. After reading the scenario the participants completed a questionnaire with five closed ended questions one which asked “would you label the incident as sexual assault or rape. Yes or no. The basic results for experiment showed that in comparison to wives who are faithful to their husband wives who are unfaithful are assigned greater responsibility the marital rape. Also results showed that this is more prominent for wives in long term marriages as compared to those in short term marriages.
The second research that dealt with how the victims dress and other components effects causal judgments for marital rape victims. This experiment showed a lot of sides to how perception can differ between genders and how a victims responsibility for being raped is based on how they were dressed.. College Undergraduates completed an Attitude towards Marriage Scale survey and read fictitious scenarios of a marital where the victim was dressed somberly or seductively and then a brief questionnaire was issued to the participants. The basic results showed that males rated the victim more deserving of the attack than females. Also the seductively dressed victim was rated more deserving than the somberly dressed victim as well as those who held more traditional attitudes towards marriage than an egalitarian attitude.
The participants used for these two research has added to the outcome/ result to the research. The fact that they use only females may have caused the result of the experiment to be different than if they were to use another gender. If only males participated in first experiment one could say
