A Study of Empathy Towards Male Victims of Sexual Violence: The Effects of Gender and Sexism

Sexual violence is a major social phenomenon that has serious deleterious consequences on victims, regardless of their gender. However, the disclosure of sexual violence, met with empathy, could help to alleviate the victim's pain by having a positive impact on their psychological wellbeing. Empathy could also reduce harmful attitudes and promote more favorable attitudes towards the victim. Thus, since empathy appears to be essential when listening to the disclosure of sexual violence, it is necessary to study the determinants of these empathetic responses. The current research contributes to the literature by studying empathy towards male victims of sexual violence depending on factors relating to gender and sexism. Both the perpetrator's and participant's gender are taken into account as well as participants' levels of hostile and benevolent sexism towards men. Hostile sexism towards men refers to the antipathy towards men and their domination whereas benevolent sexism can be characterized by a traditional admiration for men's role as protectors. With this objective in mind, 174 participants from the general population were recruited on social networking sites and completed a questionnaire on the LimeSurvey platform. Statistical analyses showed relatively high levels of empathy overall towards male victims of sexual violence. The gender of the perpetrator as well as the gender of the participant do not appear to have a predictive effect on empathy. However, the results do show an impact of hostile and benevolent sexism on empathy; benevolent sexism predicted less empathy whereas hostile sexism predicted more empathy towards male victims of sexual violence in female participants. These findings provide avenues for future research as well as new perspectives for the development of programmes aiming to promote empathy in order to increase positive responses to victims of sexual violence.