Who Blames Female Victims of Revenge Pornography?

Abstract

Revenge pornography refers to any kind of uploading or publishing private photos or videos of someone without their consent. The public can often blame female victims of revenge pornography for engaging in the risky behaviour of taking nude pictures or videos in the first place. Certain individual and socio-demographic characteristics of the public can lead to victim-blaming. We wanted to see if characteristics relevant in the context of blaming rape victims for their victimisation, such as ambivalent sexism, moral foundations, conservatism, age and gender, contribute to blaming victims of revenge pornography. Convenient sample consisted of N = 364 participants (73.3% women), with an average age of 38.07 (SD = 13.74), and slightly more socio-liberal orientation, according to self-ssessment (a broad social attitudes 7-point scale ranging from 1-liberal to 7-conservative (M = 2.97, SD = 1.49)). In an online survey, participants were presented with a vignette describing a bogus case of a woman whose pictures a man posted on the internet. The participant's task was to assess who should take responsibility for this event on a 7-point scale, ranging from 1, meaning the woman, through 4, meaning both the woman and the man equally, to 7, meaning the man. The distribution of answers was trimodal (on word anchors) and negatively asymmetric because 52.2% of participants said that the man should take responsibility. After attributing responsibility, participants filled out the Ambivalent sexism inventory with 22 items (α = .91) and the Moral foundations questionnaire with 30 items (all five subscales, α = .66-.81). Regression model with sociodemographics, together with ambivalent sexism and moral progressivity, explained 19.8% of the variance in victim-blaming (F(5, 354) = 17.22, p < .001). Ambivalent sexism (β = -0.27, p < .001) contributed the most, followed by moral progressivity (β = 0.17, p = .01), while gender, age, and conservatism were not significant predictors. Content analysis of ambivalent sexist attitudes and less progressive moral foundations can help us create a substitute for the victim-blaming narrative around victims of revenge pornography which would still fit the mindset of current victim-blamers (e. g. “women take and share their private photos or videos to special men in their life to please them”). Besides the practical application, the study's findings contribute to the ongoing debate over the theoretical soundness of Moral foundations theory because holding less progressive moral foundations, which are exclusively proposed by this theory, leads to an apology for violence.