Taken together, the qualitative and quantitative approaches give a more complete picture of why many women do not acknowledge their assault experiences as rape than data using only a single research paradigm. “For a positive social science, knowledge is constituted by the theoretical ordering of empirical observations of an objective reality. The data are descriptions […]

Although quantitative methods search for explanations, qualitative methods seek understanding (Comstock, 1994; Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Knowledge consists of consensus among informants regarding the meanings of their experiences. One method of gaining such knowledge is discourse analysis. Discourse refers to a “system of statements, practices and institu­tional structures that share common values” (Hare-Mustin, 1994, p. […]

The quantitative research reported thus far suggests there are at least seven variables on which acknowledged and unacknowledged rape victims differ—the nature of her rape script, the amount of force experienced in nonrape sexual experiences, the amount of force used by the assailant in the rape, the amount of negative affect and feelings of victimization […]

A situational variable that may influence rape acknowledgment is the use of alcohol or drugs. Richardson and Campbell (1982) found that when the victim was intoxicated, college student observers viewed her as more responsible for the rape than when she had not been drinking. Similarly, Abbey (1991) found that observers rated a woman more sexually […]

As Festinger (1950) noted many years ago, other people help us define reality. This can also be true in defining an experience as acquaintance rape. If a woman tells her friends about an assault experience and they label the experience as rape, the victim will more likely acknowledge the experience as rape then if her […]

Counterfactual thinking is another cognitive process that may lead women to not acknowledge their experience as rape. As applied to rape, counterfactual thinking would involve mentally changing or reconstructing the events that culminated in rape in such a way that something other than rape occurred (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). Unusual or […]

Although we had no prior hypotheses regarding sexual experiences and rape acknowledgment, in each of our studies (Andreoli Mathie et al., 1994; Andreoli Mathie & Kahn, 1995; Kahn et al., 1994) we examined whether acknowledged and unacknowledged victims differed in their re­sponses to each item of the SES, such as those who indicated consensual TABLE […]

Some victims may not acknowledge that rape occurred because they did not have strong emotional reactions either during the assault itself, after the assault, or both. Acknowledged victims, on the other hand, may have experienced intense emotional reactions that helped them define their experience as rape. Research has shown that women who seek assis­tance from […]

Perhaps the most obvious explanation for the existence of unacknowl­edged rape victims lies in the nature of the assault itself. It is quite possible that those victims who acknowledge the assault as rape were subjected to a higher level of physical force or threatened physical force, or displayed a higher level of resistance. There is […]

Another reason for the existence of unacknowledged rape victims may be the nature of the rape scripts some women possess. A script de­scribes the events that normally occur in a given situation (Markus & Zajonc, 1985). Fiske and Taylor (1991) summarized the evidence that peo­ple in a given culture have common scripts for a wide […]