NCJ Number
228463
Journal
Journal of Child Sexual Abuse Volume: 18 Issue: 4 Dated: July-August 2009 Pages: 422-441
Date Published
August 2009
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This study investigated perceptions about a hypothetical case of sexual grooming of a child over the Internet in which the legal definition of grooming was met and assessed blame, responsibility, and other victim-related judgments such as sympathy for the victim and the perceived severity of the assault.
Abstract
Consistent with other studies investigating gender differences in perceptions of childhood sexual abuse and as predicted, men were more negative toward the victim in all conditions than women were. Specifically, women considered the assault more serious and the victim less culpable than men did. The prediction that victims who had been lied to about the perpetrator's age would be considered in a more negative light than those in the honest condition was not the case for assault seriousness or victim culpability. The issue of CSA has generated much public and media interest in recent years, with cases involving grooming of children over the Internet and subsequent sexual assault hitting headlines. However, no psychological research has been conducted that focuses on sexual abuse after a victim has been groomed online or perceptions of victims and perpetrators involved in Internet grooming. This study investigated perceptions of CSA in a hypothetical cybersexploitation case where men were predicted to be more negative toward the victim than were women, and victims were predicted to be more negatively judged when they consented to sex than when they did not and when they were lied to than when they were not. The study assessed blame, responsibility, and other victim-related judgments. Two-hundred and seventy-six respondents read a sexual abuse depiction in which the perpetrator's disclosure about his age and the final outcome of the meeting were varied between subjects. Tables, notes, references, and appendixes