NCJ Number
207069
Journal
Violence and Victims Volume: 19 Issue: 2 Dated: April 2004 Pages: 203-220
Date Published
April 2004
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This study examined the effects of perpetrator ethnicity and gender on people’s attitudes toward a scenario involving domestic violence.
Abstract
The burgeoning research literature on domestic violence contains many avenues of controversy, including the assertion that the gender and ethnicity of the perpetrator and victim may impact the way in which the perpetrator is judged. The current study presented a domestic violence scenario to 503 undergraduate students of varying ethnicities (European American, African-American, and Latino); the scenario varied the ethnicity and gender of the perpetrator to examine the effects of these variables on attitudes toward the scenario. The study also examined the correlation between the participant’s ethnicity and gender and their attitudes toward the same scenario. Results of statistical analyses indicate that gender and ethnicity do influence attitudes concerning responsibility and culpability in situations involving domestic violence. Participants of both genders and all ethnicities perceived the scenarios as significantly more criminal in nature when the perpetrator was a male. Other salient findings included the greater likelihood of the European American participants to express criticism toward African-American perpetrators of domestic violence and the tendency of Latino participants to express significantly more sympathy toward assaulting wives than to assaulting husbands. The findings thus underscore the biased nature of perceptions of violence based on gender and ethnicity. Future research should continue to stimulate a discussion of how to minimize such biases when dealing with incidents of domestic violence. Figures, references, appendix