JRP alumna dr. Pelin Gül, who currently works as a Lecturer at the University of Twente, has recently co-authored a cross-cultural research article investigating the influence of sociocultural norms and values on judgments of marital rape in Germany, Turkey and the UK. So far, most studies on rape judgments were conducted with North American and Western European samples, and revealed that rape myths are an important sociocultural predictor of lenient judgments of rape. However, other cultural processes and mechanisms, particularly those related to honor norms, have been largely neglected.

Following recent theoretical developments in the cultural psychology literature, the authors were interested in investigating to what extent culture of honor norms predict attributions of blame to victims and perpetrators in the context of marital rape. Additionally, they investigated the role of a contextual predictor: what happens to perceptions when marital rape occurs after a threat to the perpetrator’s masculine reputation (vs. no such threat)?

They recruited participants from Turkey (a cultural context with strong honor values and traditions), as well as Germany and the UK (cultural contexts with strong dignity values and less emphasis on honor), to present them with vignettes describing a marital rape situation.

The results showed that, in all three cultures, participants blamed the victim and exonerated the perpetrator more when the husband’s reputation was threatened than in the absence of such threat. Yet, the effect of masculine reputation threat was somewhat more pronounced among Turkish than German or British participants. Furthermore, their results revealed that honor norms are the primary predictor of rape perceptions and blame attributions in Turkey (an honor culture), but not in Germany and Britain (dignity cultures) where rape myth acceptance was the strongest predictor.

In sum, these findings demonstrate that the key sociocultural predictors of blame attribution to marital rape victims and lenient perceptions of perpetrators are not identical in honor and dignity cultures. Therefore, interventions that aim to reduce negative attitudes toward rape victims may be more effective if they focus primarily on addressing honor norms in honor cultures, whereas myths and stereotypes about sexual aggression may be the most important cultural factors that need to be addressed in dignity cultures. We congratulate the authors on this important contribution in the field of cultural psychology and wish them all the best in their future endeavours.

You can read the full article here.