Sexual Harassment Survivors Who Aren’t Conventionally Attractive Face Discrimination, Finds Study
Life for a person being born on this side of the gender fence is laden with hardships. None of it is anything that is resulting from our actions. Like I understand actions come with consequences, you know like when you don’t study and fail in an exam. But here we are suffering for owning a vagina, while the other side of the human population is enjoying penis privileges. The number of women who get sexually assaulted is huge and so is the number of women who don’t get justice. Imagine, a woman faces sex abuse, and then she has to prove to the law, to the society that the perp who did it is lying and she isn’t. Apart from battling with the trauma of the crime, she also has to struggle to convince people or deal with being called a liar or an opportunist.
They say, there have been incidences when women falsely accused men of rape. Yes, but that is no reason to lose faith in us when the number of times when men have actually committed the crime. How many women who face sexual harassment at work have had people claim that she is falsely blaming the person to get commercial benefits. How many girls who were abused by uncles and stepfathers were not believed by their family? It’s sickening.
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According to a recent study, women who don’t fall into the stereotypical definition of attractiveness our society holds up are unfortunately less like to be believed to have been sexually harassed. “The consequences of that are very severe for women who fall outside of the narrow representation of who a victim is. Nonprototypical women are neglected in ways that could contribute to them having discriminatory treatment under the law; people think they’re less credible—and less harmed—when they make a claim and think their perpetrators deserve less punishment,” said Bryn Bandt-Law, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Washington and one of the study’s lead authors, as reported by ANI News.
This makes it difficult for people who don’t look airbrushed and photoshopped to be convincing sex abuse survivors. Like what the fuck even? The study authors said that they thought of conducting the research from the global #MeToo movement after several women came forward to report sexual assault. “But as the study’s authors reflected on the celebrities who stepped forward, they wanted to explore further the notion of credibility. They set up a series of experiments to be divided among the 4,000 participants to address three research questions: who we think is sexually harassed; what constitutes harassment; and how claims of harassment are perceived. The experiments largely consisted of written scenarios and digitally manipulated headshots,” reporting Washington.edu.
Apparently, previous research has found some attributes that the society has defined as signature of women: young, feminine, conventionally attractive, and even weak and incompetent. So unless you are incompetent and submissive, and conventionally attractive, please expect to be dismissed when you say you were assaulted. Like she looks like such a strong woman – physically and mentally – how can she allow that? She must be lying to defame a good man. Oh she isn’t like 36-24-36, why would someone even sexually harass her at work? This is so pathetic.
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“Researchers’ scenarios drew upon different ways that psychologists say sexual harassment can manifest: coercion, with a quid pro quo expectation; unwanted advances, with no quid pro quo; and gender harassment, which are hostile comments and behaviors tied to a person’s gender. In one scenario, for example, a supervisor who puts his hand around a female employee’s waist; in another, a supervisor asks about a female employee’s boyfriend. Some scenarios were clear and egregious violations of the law, some were clearly benign, and some were appropriately vague,” Washington.edu reported.
In fact, when participants were presented with headshots of prototypical women, and a fabricated story of sex abuse, they believed it more easily and felt strongly for the perp to be punished. However, when the same story was presented with a nonprototypical woman, “victims are seen as less credible, less harmed by the harassment, and their harasser is seen as less deserving of punishment.”
“When you make a perception of harassment, you also make a connection to womanhood, but the way we understand womanhood is very narrowly defined. So for anyone who falls outside of that definition, it makes it hard to make that connection to harassment,” UW psychology professor Cheryl Kaiser said.
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Researchers believe that this study will help highlight how law and society can be biased against nonprototypical women, resulting in the denial of justice. “If we have biased perceptions of harm for nonprototypical women, it will drastically change their legal outcomes. If they’re not being believed, they’re effectively being silenced,” Bandt-Law said on sex abuse and justice.
