Abstract

Although the perceived victim-likeness of sexual violence victims can affect people’s attitudes and judgments toward sexual assault cases and the victims, little systematic research has been conducted in Korea. This study applied the individual difference scaling (INDSCAL) and multi-dimensional unfolding, types of the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) models, to data collected from 175 college students to find out factors that people consider significantly in evaluating victim-likeness. Specifically, the authors derived the four factors related to the victim-likeness perception from previous studies (‘whether or not the victim appeal to the violence actively,’ ‘whether or not the victim’s suffering is visible,’ ‘whether or not the victim’s clothing is tidy,’ and ‘estimated time of the violence’) and produced pictures describing the victims by manipulated those factors. The participants rated the similarity of victims in terms of victim-likeness by comparing the two pictures presented in a pair. The result finds that the participants considered whether or not the victim’s suffering is visible to evaluate the victim-likeness. As a result of comparing the perceptions of victims being clustered pictures in the two-dimensional space, the differences were found only in depicting the victim as ‘lying’ and ‘calm.’ Individuals’ weights for the dimension of the visibility of the victim’s suffering did not differ in both gender and the acceptance level of sexual violence myth. The multi-dimensional unfolding analysis using ranking data of the four factors’ importance showed no gender difference. On the other hand, the participants with a higher acceptance of the sexual violence myth showed to consider the clothing and late outing of the victim more significantly. It is meaningful that this study found that, regardless of gender and the level of sexual violence myth, whether or not the victim’s suffering was visible contributed to the evaluation of victim-likeness, and the factor was related to assessing the victims’ credibility.