Gender Differences in Students' Attitudes toward Rape

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Abstract
Two of the major concerns in a burgeoning rape literature have been: (1) to determine whether people believe the myths about rape and (2) investigating the observers' attributions of responsibility for rape. In this paper, these issues are studied by developing an acceptance of the rape myths scale which is administered to a college student sample. The findings suggest that: (1) most students reject the more obvious of the rape myths, while evidencing problems with “subtle” ones, (2) gender differences do exist, with women being significantly more likely to reject many of the rape myths, and (3) interpersonal factors, rather than structural ones, are believed to be the causes of rape.