Do I have to blame the perpetrator if I can't blame the victim anymore? Bystander responsibility in contact sexual violence scenarios

Sexual violence is far too common in the U.S. and across the world (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014). Bystander interventions are one type of intervention that aim to reduce contact sexual violence incidence as well as other problematic features of sexual violence like victim blame. Despite bystander intervention popularity, research has yet to address what people think about bystanders themselves and if people blame them in sexual violence scenarios. Across three sets of studies (N = 887), participants read a simple vignette that explicitly stated a man had raped/sexually assaulted a woman and participants were then asked to allocate blame to the perpetrator, victim, and bystanders. In some studies, bystanders were not explicitly mentioned, and participants had to self-nominate others who they thought could be responsible. In other studies, possible bystanders were listed by the researchers. Our results replicated across all sets of studies and indicated that people rarely thought to allocate blame to bystanders when they were not explicitly mentioned. When bystanders were explicitly mentioned, participants gave some blame to the bystanders and consequently reduced blame to the perpetrator. Our results have important implications for both legal settings and sexual assault prevention. Our research suggests that people who are reminded of bystanders in contact sexual violence scenarios (e.g., rape) allocate blame to those bystanders and do so by reducing blame to the perpetrator, but do not think to blame bystanders when they are not mentioned. Prevention specialists should be aware that a potential side effect of bystander interventions is program participants blaming themselves or other bystanders when sexual violence occurs.