Five Decades of Research on Rape Myths and Victim Interpretation

ABSTRACT

Over the past 5 decades of social science research, scholars have examined false narratives and beliefs associated with rape and sexual assault (often called “rape myths”). This scoping review employs an innovative technique to sample and describe a large cohort of scholarly articles that investigate sexual assault victim interpretation and rape myths between the years 1973 and 2025. We describe how the field has gone through innovations such as the development of rape myth measurement scales, experimental and field research designs, an increasing emphasis on rape myths in legal contexts, and a broadening exploration of the types of victims affected by rape myths. We discuss trends such as the association between gender and rape myths, and common theoretical explanations for their persistence. We further highlight current gaps in the literature and offer areas where future research can expand current knowledge.

1. Introduction

In the 1970s, social scientists prompted by feminist activists and scholars began to interrogate the cultural and social dimensions of sexual assault. Susan Brownmiller's influential Against Our Will, published in 1975, challenged both the public and academics to consider how gendered power dynamics entrenched in sexism created a cultural milieu in which rape victims received unfair hearings in both legal contexts and public opinion. Scholars began to use terms like “rape myth” and “sex stereotyping” to describe false beliefs and ideas about gender, sex, and violence. Such beliefs underpin what is often called “rape culture,” in which sexual assault is normalized (Krulewitz and Payne 1978; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974; Johnson and Johnson 2017; Persson and Dhingra 2022). This body of work argued that in order to understand and address sexual assault as a social phenomenon, we must understand the schemas, beliefs, myths, and ideas that filter our perceptions of sexual assault, its victims, and its perpetrators. These perceptions are of particular importance when it comes to the criminal justice system and the outcomes of sexual assault criminal procedures. An abundance of research has pointed to the traumatizing effects of criminal procedures for assault survivors as well as to the “justice gap,” which refers to the attrition of sexual assault criminal cases (e.g., Bohner et al. 2009; Krakauer 2015; Curley et al. 2024; Hudspith et al. 2024; Millar et al. 2025).

These questions, including the implications for criminal justice outcomes and the ways in which these beliefs and myths render some victims more visible than others, remain relevant for scholars, public officials, and activists. Modern social movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp underscore the persistent, problematic, and often controversial interpretations of sexual assault victims within the criminal justice system and public opinion. To better understand how the beliefs and myths related to sexual assault shape scholarly engagement and its implications for criminal justice outcomes, there is a need to evaluate how academic research has interpreted and responded to these issues. This scoping review aims to identify key trends, findings, and gaps in research on rape myths and victim interpretation by examining a broad sample of peer‐reviewed journal articles across law, criminology, gender studies, criminal justice, psychology, sociology, and social work.

Many researchers have conducted systematic reviews of specific aspects of beliefs about victims, victim interpretation, rape myths, and related phenomena (e.g., Ribeiro and Nitschke 2025; Russell and Hand 2017; Turchik and Edwards 2012). However, few scholarly articles have attempted a broad review of the field. The broader investigations that do exist tend to focus on narrow terminology, employ small or unspecified samples, or lack clear inclusion criteria (Suarez and Gadalla 2010; Van der Bruggen and Grubb 2014; Persson and Dhingra 2022; Horvath and Brown forthcoming). Additionally, some foundational reviews were published more than a decade ago and therefore did not cover contemporary and emerging trends in the field (Suarez and Gadalla 2010; Van der Bruggen and Grubb 2014). Furthermore, the concept of “rape myth” is not the only frame used in scholarship to describe hostile or biased attitudes towards sexual assault victims. Not all work that is relevant to understanding the schemas, beliefs, myths, and ideas that filter perceptions of sexual assault, its victims, and its perpetrators, employs the language of “rape myths” and so may not have been included in previous reviews. Thus, while the social issues that arise from rape myths and hostile or biased victim interpretation appear to remain persistent, and the volume of academic work produced on the subject is increasing, the field's full breadth and its capacity to offer academic insight and policy solutions are not always clear. This review offers a broader investigation of enduring patterns in findings, including scholarship on victim interpretation beyond the explicit frame of “rape myths.” By using inclusion criteria and systematically investigating what is central to the field, we can identify enduring gaps in the literature, better understand the full extent of our current knowledge, and direct future inquiry.

After describing our methodology below, we share our findings, which offer an overview of the research on sexual assault and victim interpretation, including rape myths, from the 1970s through early 2025. Our findings reveal significant trends in the number and types of inquiries, methodologies employed, empirical findings, innovations, recent trends, and significant gaps in knowledge. We end by discussing the meaning of these findings for current and future research on victim interpretation, rape myths, and the criminal justice system.

2. Methods

This review aims to identify patterns and key findings in research examining how victims of rape and sexual assault are interpreted across the fields of social science, criminology, and social‐legal studies. Thus, our methodology falls under what is often referred to as a “scoping” review, which seeks to uncover the breadth of knowledge in a field and often requires adaptive search techniques (Arksey and O’Malley 2005; Kia et al. 2021). The 50 journals comprising our scoping review are peer‐reviewed, English language journals across the social sciences including, sociology, psychology, social work, criminology, and social legal studies. The articles we extracted from these journals substantively addressed how various elements of society view sexual assault victims.

It was vital to allow our sample to capture a wide range of articles, including articles that discuss victim interpretation without using “rape myth” terminology. Searching an entire database, such as Web of Science or ProQuest, for broad terms like “sexual assault” would produce too large a list to work through. However, only searching for particular search terms, such as “rape myths,” would miss much research that fits our inclusion criteria. Thus, we adopted a generative technique for selecting potential sources. We began with a few key journals focused on victimology and criminology with prominent publications related to rape myths and survivor interpretation: Interpersonal Violence, International Review of Victimology, Psychology Injury and Law, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, Violence and Victims, Feminist Legal Studies, Law & Social Inquiry. We then searched through these journals using the following key terms: “rape,” “rape myth,” “sexual assault,” and “sexual violence.” Based on the citation lists of the articles we selected for our review, we identified additional journals that had published related work. We then added these journals to our search list. Using this generative method, we searched through an initial list of 17 journals, at which point we deemed we were seeing repetitive themes across journal searches. We took the remaining list of journals and added prominent general subject journals, such as Law and Society and Gender and Society, and split them into categories based on their primary aims and scope: criminology, criminal justice, socio‐legal studies, psychology, gender studies, and social work. We selected the top two to four journals in each area based on the number in that category and the highest impact factor and citation scores. This approach yielded an additional 31 journals. Finally, we added two journals we discovered in the course of the database searches (e.g., searching for “Men and Masculinities” yielded findings from the “Psychology of Men & Masculinities”). Altogether, we reviewed 50 journals.

We searched the selected journals through June 2025 using Ebscohost or ProQuest database search tools. If the previous search tools had limited access to a journal, we used the journal's direct webpage or publisher to search for relevant articles. The publication dates and timelines of the journals themselves dictated our timeline. The earliest articles selected into our database were from 1973, and the latest from 2025. We used the search terms: “rape”, “sexual assault”, or “sexual violence” for all journals and “rape myth” for about two‐thirds (it became redundant as the “rape” search term already captured “rape myth” hits). We then worked through the result list, selecting articles that substantially assess how victims of sexual assault were interpreted by themselves or others (e.g., blamed for assault, given sympathy, treated as credible or not). Given the broad scope and the common types of results from our initial search, we also found it useful to create a list of exclusion criteria to help us eliminate articles that look at related phenomena but are not directly associated with our parameters. See Table 1 below for inclusion/exclusion criteria.

TABLE 1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Journal inclusion criteria	Article inclusion criteria	Article exclusion criteria (did not include studies that…)
Aimed primarily at publishing work in the following areas: Social science (sociology, criminology, gender, psychology), socio‐legal, criminal justice, or social work	Must substantially address (as the primary focus) issues of sexual assault or violence	Only look at disclosure or reporting rates
Contains at least one journal article identified within the scope of the study or identified as the flagship publication for a relevant national scholarly organization	Must substantially address (as primary focus) how sexual assault victims are interpreted	Focus on domestic, intimate partner, or interpersonal violence broadly
Published in English		Only look at diagnosis rates
Peer‐reviewed research		Only look at the characteristics of the crime of rape or sexual assault, or the assailant

Given the variation in journal requirements and formats, as well as information available in databases, some articles were more readily accessible than others. For some journals, we used Microsoft Copilot AI software to assist with sorting through our initial list of articles and determining whether they fall within the scope of our study. When the journal abstracts, introductions, or conclusions did not clearly provide the needed information, we used Microsoft Copilot to help fill in some key codes. For example, we might provide Copolit with the article reference and ask it: “What were the main variables included in the study?”, or “What was its geographic location?” We performed quality control checks by periodically comparing these search results with close readings of actual article content and with other codes, article abstracts, and other portions of the article text. After applying the inclusion criteria, we concluded with a final sample of 631 articles in our database.

We coded each article we included in our database for the following: journal and year of publication, methods (included measurement instrument if relevant), theoretical lens (if emphasized), key words or terms, geographic location(s) of study, whether it used the term “rape myth” or some other term, who was being measured for rape myths or other beliefs (i.e., college student's opinions or victims themselves), characteristics of the victim, characteristics of the perpetrator, characteristics of the observers or participants (such as mock jurors), aspects of the assault scenario, and key findings. Once we read through and coded each article, we compiled and analyzed observed trends. We further uploaded our data and codes to ATLAS.ti software, which allowed us to explore trends in greater detail, both for articles that explicitly use the term “rape myth” and for articles that do not. We are happy to provide the complete list of journals and selected articles upon request. In the findings section below, we include a small number of in‐text citations to articles published in the journals we reviewed for our sample, but which appeared after the cut off date for our sample. These additional articles were not included in percentage calculations or numerical summaries of trends.

3. Findings

The number of articles in our sample increased significantly each decade from 1973 to 2025 (see Figure 1). The studies come from 49 countries spreading across six continents, with about 49.5% of all studies originating in the US, followed by the UK (approximately 16% of all the articles in our database), Australia (approximately 6%), and Canada (5%). Research within the U.S. context is more likely to be quantitative while research outside the U.S. makes more extensive use of qualitative research methods such as interviews (e.g., Bull and Page 2021; Dalton 2017; Warrick 2005; Smith and Skinne 2012) and content analysis (e.g., Calavita 2001; O’Neill et al. 2025). Topically, we recognized two themes that were either less prominent or absent from U.S. based research: ambivalent sexism (e.g., Hill and Marshall 2018; Tendayi Viki et al. 2004) and conflict‐based sexual assault (e.g., Schulz 2019).

FIGURE 1.

Rape Myth and victim interpretation articles over time.

Many scholars have proposed scales and definitions that refine the measurement and operationalization of rape myths. Yet, the underlying premise of rape myths as a theoretical definition has remained relatively consistent for many decades (Lonsway and Fitzgerald 1995; Grella et al. 2025). Burt (1980), 217, who introduced the “Rape Myth Acceptance Scale,” defined rape myths as “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists—[that create] a climate hostile to rape victims” (1980). The top three themes coded for the articles examining rape myths focused on issues of blame, including attribution of blame and myths relating to sexual assault by an acquaintance versus a stranger.

While the term “rape myth” remains popular (appearing in approximately one‐third of our sample), it is not the only term used in the field to describe similar patterns (Gurnham 2016). Approximately two‐thirds of the articles in our dataset did not use the terminology “rape myth.” Other than failing to employ “rape myth scales” or use the term “rape myths,” these articles did not ask substantively different questions compared to articles that did (Feild 1978; Godzisz and Mazurczak 2022; Spears and Spohn 1996). For example, Bridges (1991) examined the relationship between “rape supportive attitudes” and expected gender roles. O'Neal (2019) found that police officers' preconceived ideas about “real rape” affected how they interpreted female victims' complaints, and Caricati et al. (2023) found that male victims were “blamed” for their assault more than female victims if their attacker was believed to be attractive.

3.1. Measuring Rape Myths

The earliest articles in our sample were published in 1973 and 1974 using terms such as “rape myth” and “mythology of rape” (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974; Weis and Borges 1973; Schwendinger and Schwendinger's 1974) article ties together all three of the most prevalent themes in our dataset: rape myth, the legal system, and blame, exploring how rape myths, such as victim‐blaming, shape the legal system, public discourse, and everyday interactions. Other early work began to test whether situational variables, such as the level of acquaintance with or resistance to the accused, affected sentencing recommendations and judgments about the legitimacy of victims' claims (Scroggs 1976; Smith et al. 1976).

The number and scope of studies examining what constituted a “legitimate” or sympathetic rape victim expanded through the 1980s and 1990s. Mock jury experiments or questionnaires (often administered to a convenience sample of college students) were the dominant mode of inquiry (e.g., Szymanski et al. 1993; Villemur and Hyde 1983). Respondents read hypothetical rape vignettes, in which researchers manipulated different variables about the alleged victim, perpetrator, and scenario to examine which correlated with attributing blame to a rape victim or the belief that a rape did or did not occur. These variables commonly included the victim's attractiveness, the victim's respectability or sexual experience, the level of resistance (physical, verbal), the level of intoxication, and prior acquaintance between victim and perpetrator (e.g., Branscombe et al. 1996; Deitz et al. 1984; McCaul et al. 1990; Tieger 1981). Additionally, researchers examined how different qualities or attributes of the respondent correlated with the respondent's attribution of blame and judgment of the victim and the occurrence including the gender or race of the respondent, and their belief in sex role and gender role attitudes (e.g., Acock and Ireland 1983; Fischer 1986; Snell and Godwin 1993; Willis 1992).

During the 1980s and 1990s, calibrated and validated questionnaires used to measure survey respondents' level of agreement with “rape myths” became increasingly popular (Payne et al. 1999). These decades are marked by the publication of two particularly influential scales. In 1980, Martha R. Burt introduced the “Rape Myth Acceptance Scale” (RMAS), which used Likert‐style questions to test individuals' level of agreement with rape myths such as the victim's dress or behavior corresponding with her culpability. Roughly 20 years later, Payne et al. (1999) introduced the “Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale” (IRMAS), which set out to better reflect current ideas and language about rape. The IRMAS gained popularity as an instrument and has been used most widely across the field to measure individuals' levels of beliefs in rape myths, including both the “long” and “short” versions (Lonsway and Fitzgerald 1994). Scholars have developed additional general and specific instruments for measuring rape myth acceptance, often citing the need for updated or more precise measures. For example, the “Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression” (AMMSA) scale updated its content to reflect contemporary public discourse and detect more subtle beliefs (Gerger et al. 2007; Hine and Murphy 2019). It further shows promise for capturing rape myths across language and international contexts (Persson et al. 2025). Additionally, recent measures, such as the “Male Rape Myth Acceptance” and “Forced‐to‐Penetrate Myth Acceptance Scales,” allow scholars to measure juror, legal, and public interpretations of male assault victims specifically (Weare and Willmott 2025a, 2025b).

Research focusing on victim interpretation, rape myths, sexual assault, the legal system, and questions of blame continued to increase throughout the 1990s. The 90s also introduced articles engaging with what we term “beliefs about gender” as a factor influencing the perception of sexual assault victims. Articles within this group examined, for example, whether observers in mock jury scenarios holding traditional gender‐role beliefs judge victims more harshly (Snell and Godwin 1993) or whether men who enjoy sexist humor endorse stronger rape myths (Ryan and Kanjorski 1998).

Methodologically, vignettes and survey inquiries continued to proliferate and dominate the field while additional qualitative methods, such as content analysis and interviews, gained prevalence towards the end of the 1990s. The diversity in research methods is consistent with the growing interest since the 1990s and through the 2000s in the effects of bias and rape myths on the legal system and law enforcement beyond mock jury scenarios, including those holding judicial positions and whether and how rape myths showed up in the arguments and verdicts used in actual legal cases (e.g. Calavita 2001; Cossins 2003; Cossins et al. 2009; Gunby et al. 2012; Mack 1994; Stewart et al. 1996; Zajac and Cannan 2009).

Two other significant methodological trends began in the 1990s and gained momentum in the 2000s and 2010s. First, more researchers began focusing on victims of sexual assault as the research population (e.g., Campbell et al. 2001; Frazier 1990; LeMaire et al. 2016; Miller et al. 2011; Okur et al. 2019; Peterson and Muehlenhard 2004). Second, scholars showed increased attention to the interpretation of child sexual assault (e.g., Burrows and Powell 2015; Cossins et al. 2009; Herman and Freitas 2010; Ring 2017; Whittier 2015; Zajac and Cannan 2009). Additional methods, such as focus groups, ethnography, and diverse quantitative methods, also gained momentum during the 2010s (e.g., Campbell and Fehler‐Cabral 2018; Gunby et al. 2012; Murphy et al. 2021; Stewart et al. 2025).

Since 2020 the historical trends we outlined herein have expanded inquiries into sexual assault victims interpretation, including those related to rape myths (e.g., Franklin and Garza 2021; Rennie 2023; Zidenberg et al. 2021), the legal system (e.g., Gore 2020), law enforcement (e.g., Mourtgos et al. 2021), and blame (e.g., Li and Zheng 2022). If the methodological trajectory of this decade continues, it will produce a greater quantity and diversity of research than any previous decade. Below, we discuss key trends in findings and identify significant gaps we hope future research will address.

3.2. Victims and Perpetrators

The overwhelming majority of articles in our database examine how potential juries and other actors interpret female victims assaulted by a male perpetrator. Research shows that these interpretations have particular implications for the criminal justice system since female victims are judged harshly by potential jurors, law enforcement officers and prosecutors for past sexual behavior, and allegations of rape are viewed with increased skepticism in cases where a female victim had a prior relationship or acquaintanceship with the male perpetrator (Pacilli et al. 2024; Pedersen and Strömwall 2013). Findings across our data suggest that certain behaviors, such as drinking, prior sexual experience, or being perceived as physically attractive, make juries read a female victim's assault as more understandable and the victim herself as more culpable (Campbell et al. 2015; Clarke and Lawson 2009; Martin and Monds 2023).

Articles mentioning male victims have appeared more prominently since the 2000s. Yet male victims are still mentioned in only 10% of the articles in our database, with half of those articles mentioning both male and female victims. Nevertheless, research that addresses male victims demonstrated that rape myths and gender and sex bias matter in these cases as well. Cultural gender stereotypes and gender social norms regarding masculinity are central to male rape myths (Turchik and Edwards 2012). Cultural assumptions cast men as sexual initiators, leading jurors to view their assaults as less credible and sympathetic, especially in cases where the aggressor was a woman (e.g., Hancock et al. 2021; Hannon et al. 2000; Spencer and Tan 1999). Male rape myths were also identified among service providers and other professionals, such as police officers (Emezue and Udmuangpia 2020; Murphy and Hine 2018). The minimization of male victims and belief in male rape myths is prevelant not only among the general public or legal professionals, but also among male victims themselves, influencing their sexual trauma (e.g., Artime et al. 2014; O’Brien et al. 2015; Patterson and Cole 2025; Reed et al. 2020; Weare et al. 2024). Few articles in our database explicitly examined how transgender or nonbinary victims of sexual assault are interpreted, but what exists suggests juries may be less sympathetic to transgender victims compared to other victims (Godzisz and Mazurczak 2022).

Other demographic factors, such as age, sexuality, and race, also impact how victims are interpreted. In the case of child sexual assault, older children are often believed less and blamed more for their assault (Bottoms and Goodman 1994; Denne et al. 2023). The intersection of gender and sexuality also influences the perception of sexual assault victims. Some studies observed that juries were less sympathetic to non‐heterosexual male victims (Anderson 2007; White and Yamawaki 2009) but more empathetic towards lesbian versus straight female victims attacked by men (Geoghagan et al. 2025).

Few studies in our sample explicitly included the victim's race as a variable of interest. Nonetheless, research in our database suggests that race impacts victims' access to the justice system and support services (e.g., Cossins 2003; Mariana and McFeely 2019). It also influences how victims are perceived, with non‐white victims subject to less sympathy and more harmful stereotypes, which frame them as “bad women,” such as stereotypes associating black women with heightened sexuality (e.g., Cossins 2003; Johnson et al. 2022). Further, many articles use ethnicity as interchangeable with race (e.g., Vrij and Fischer 1997; Canan et al. 2016; Merrilees et al. 2018). Even articles that addressed ethnicity as distinct from race compared a specific ethnic group to white victims and did not explore differences among non‐white groups (Cancoro de Matos and McFeely 2019; George 2025). A notable exception is Schneider et al.'s (2009) work, which looks at the ethnicity of both perpetrators and victims and compares white, Hispanic, and Asian American to one another.

In addition to demographic factors, victim behavior such as casual sex, drinking, resisting (or not), and demeanor when being interviewed by investigating officers or examined on the witness stand have all been associated with how likely a victim is to be believed, blamed, or afforded empathy by jurors, police, and court officials (e.g., Campbell et al. 2015; Ellison and Munro 2009; George et al. 2022; St. George and Spohn 2018). If a victim's behavior or moral character is seen as lacking, at a minimum, her assault may be viewed as less tragic compared to someone believed to be sexually chaste or sober. At worst, she may not be believed or blamed for her own assault (Campbell et al. 2015; Martin and Monds 2023). If victims do not act how people expect them to by forcefully or verbally resisting, appearing distressed, avoiding or leaving abusers, or correctly recalling details while being interviewed, they are viewed with more skepticism (Campbell et al. 2015; Idisis and Edoute 2017; Smith and Skinne 2012).

3.3. Observer Characteristics: Who Is More Likely to Endorse Rape Myths?

In addition to exploring victims and perpetrators characteristics and behavior, researchers have interrogated how the characteristics of observers, those asked to interpret alleged sexual assaults, affect victim judgment and the employment of rape myths (e.g., Cowan and Curtis 1994; Jenkins and Dambrot 1987; Hayes‐Smith and Levett 2010; Schulze and Koon‐Magnin 2017). These explorations take two main forms in our database, which we examine in this section. First, investigators examine the theoretical mechanisms that enable rape myth endorsement. Second, they investigate how individual characteristics, particularly an observer's own gender identity, make someone more or less likely to hear a case sympathetically.

A number of theoretical mechanisms in our database are used in tandem with the rape myth or similar concepts to help explain potential jurors' and others' endorsement of rape myths broadly construed. The three most prevalent theoretical mechanisms discussed in our database are Just World Beliefs, Attribution Theory, and Gender Stereotyping or Hostility. Both the “Just World” and “Attribution” theories draw primarily on psychological research that examines the psychological mechanisms and strategies by which people make sense of difficult or untenable realities (Lerner and Simmons 1966; Finch and Munro 2007). Belief in a Just World posits that people have varying degrees of belief about how the “world works”‐ either they are more likely to accept that the world is sometimes inexplicably cruel or unfair, or they are more likely to reject this and believe the world is ultimately just and fair (Lerner and Simmons 1966). When those who believe the world is just are confronted with a crime such as sexual assault, they attempt to resolve the potential threat to their worldview by looking for ways to justify the crime. Often, this justification centers on the victim's culpability. Overall, tests of this hypothesis have supported the theory suggesting that the more people believe in a Just World, the more likely they are to blame victims or endorse rape myths (Hayes et al. 2013; Idisis and Edoute 2017; Raver et al. 2025).

Attribution Theory focuses on how observers assign blame and culpability to victims, often based on whether the observer believes individuals have power or control within a sexual encounter. Female victims of sexual assault, in particular, are afforded more sympathy when people deem they had less control in an assault scenario, such as, when the attacker used physical force, or when the attacker was a stranger (vs. an acquaintance) (Katz et al. 2007; Pedersen and Strömwall 2013). Conversely, people blame victims more when they believe the victim chose to engage in risky behavior, such as drinking or engaging in casual sex. Most tests of Attribution Theory broadly support these assumptions (Finch and Munro 2007; Gunby et al. 2012; Martin and Monds 2023; Pacilli et al. 2024).

The third prevalent theory in our database is Gender‐Based Stereotyping. While this theory is sometimes used in tandem with Just World or Attribution Theory, which focus more on individual psychological mechanisms, applications of Gender‐Based Stereotyping often focus on collective explanations of culture or socialization. Many rape myths are inherently tied to ideas about gender, autonomy, and sex, which people learn from their social environments. For example, people may judge a male perpetrator less harshly if he is in a relationship with the victim or if they believe the victim was sexually appealing because they have been socialized to believe men are at the mercy of sexual urges, or, that women owe men sex (Davies and Rogers 2009; Franklin and Garza 2021; Gotovac and Towson 2015). Sometimes the association between rape myths and gendered beliefs is described in terms of hostility towards or bias against women. People who view or have been socialized to view women negatively tend to believe in and apply rape myths more (Hine and Murphy 2019; Jones et al. 1998). Similarly, investigators find that the less egalitarian or liberal someone's ideas about gender roles or sexuality, the more likely they are to endorse rape myths (Johnson et al. 2024; Judson et al. 2013; LeMaire et al. 2016).

Researchers also investigate how observers' social identities impact their perception of sexual assault and sexual assault survivors. The most studied characteristic of observers affecting their perception of sexual assault victims is the observer's gender. The research suggests that women jurors, police officers, and other observers treat victims' stories as more credible, show them more empathy, profess less belief in rape myths, and demand harsher sentencing for sexual assault compared to male observers. These findings appear to be true regardless of the victim's gender (Fakunmoju 2022; Johnson et al. 2022; Zvi 2021). Researchers have also studied how other characteristics, such as age, nationality, or prior experience with abuse, affect how observers interpret sexual assault victims (Emezue and Udmuangpia 2020; Fakunmoju 2022; Rich et al. 2021). While these scholars found associations between these factors and their effects on the interpretation of victims, research examining these factors was not prevalent enough in our sample to identify clear trends.

3.4. Criminal Justice Outcomes and the Consequences of Victim Interpretation

Finally, articles across our database examined how biases, preconceived ideas about victims, perpetrators, and the supposed culpability of survivors interact with institutional contexts to produce differential outcomes. Victims subjected to rape myths and biased interpretation may face a myriad of consequences both before, during, and after they encounter the criminal justice system. Research has found that, on an interpersonal level, victims who are treated unsympathetically by others may have a difficult time labeling their own assault as rape or seeking support (LeMaire et al. 2016). More often, research in our database examined the tangible outcomes that rape myths and biased victim interpretation produce in the criminal justice system. The majority of research in our data set examines the attitudes of potential jurors. Mock jury studies consistently show that the more rape myth endorsement and gender bias or sexism potential jurors show, the more likely they are to acquit alleged assailants and/or administer more lenient punishment even when convictions are achieved (Curley et al. 2024; Headd and Willmott 2025; Millar et al. 2025).

Other work has examined rape myths as they relate to additional actors in the criminal justice system including, police officers, judges, and prosecutors. Rape myths and associated factors, such as use of force and the victim's sexual history, impact how effectively and persistently police officers conduct their investigations and whether prosecutors decide to press charges (Campbell and Fehler‐Cabral 2018; St. George and Spohn 2018; Venema 2018). Studies find that judges, prosecutors, and defence lawyers often rely on rape myths and associated assumptions throughout legal proceedings (Hashmi et al. 2025; Temkin et al. 2018). Similar to juries, judges may be more likely to acquit alleged attackers once rape myths or similar mechanisms are used to interpret a case (Duncanson and Henderson 2014; Mack 1994; Richardson et al. 2025).

Recent work highlights that the form and type of rape myths may vary across institutions and should be examined within specific institutional restraints and contexts. For example, Hashimi, Reid, and Brown's (2025) content analysis of judicial rhetoric in the United States and Canada revealed that judges appeared to endorse some rape myths but challenge others. Campbell and Fehler‐Cabral’s (2018) investigation showed that police decisions to pursue rape kit testing were affected by a complex interplay of both biased thinking and practical resource restraints. Denne et al. (2023) found that not only did defense attorneys rely on rape myths in court transcripts, but they used them strategically, changing tactics based on the age of the accusers and what they believed the jury would find most plausible.

4. Discussion

Our findings, which span more than 5 decades, demonstrate that the biased way we interpret sexual assault victims, including the endorsement of rape myths, is firmly entrenched within legal institutions and culture. Here, we highlight the most pressing issues for scholars to address; first, developing precise instruments while engaging in expansive scholarly conversations beyond the boundaries of specific terminology and context; second, expanding our base of knowledge regarding population and methodology.

First, we must continue to push our ability to measure rape myths and study whether and how they change. Some trends, such as judging female sexual assault victims for engaging in “irresponsible” behavior, the connection between excusing sexism and endorsing rape myths, and the fact that male observers judge victims more skeptically, have proved remarkably stable across the literature (Ostermann and Watson 2024; Snow and Longpré 2025). At the same time, it is difficult to postulate whether beliefs in rape myths and similar biases against sexual assault victims are increasing, decreasing, remaining constant, or shifting, including in the criminal justice system. Few studies have taken a longitudinal approach to examine possible changes in rape myth endorsement among respondents, populations, or institutions over time. Indeed, attempting to quantify such a change would present methodological difficulties. Language and ideas shift over time. Thus, any instrument used to measure rape myth acceptance at one point in time may no longer reliably measure the same concepts a few decades later (Payne et al. 1999). In response to the reliability issue created by shifting language and social meaning, as well as the need to understand rape myths in the context of specific populations, many scholars have developed and validated promising new instruments (McMahon and Farmer 2011; Weare and Willmott 2025a, 2025b). While these new measures are necessary to expand the specificity and accuracy of the field, they also reduce comparability across studies. We encourage researchers to consider how to address the issue of longitudinal comparison. One possibility is to conduct more studies that employ multiple instruments.

In addition to reliability and comparability, our research shows the need to broaden the scholarly conversations and take into account the diversity of terminology used to describe the phenomenon of bias towards or false beliefs about sexual assault victims. Over half of the articles in our sample did not explicitly use the term “rape myth” despite investigating the same sorts of questions as those which used the term. While “myth” is a common term used to describe the attitudes, characteristics, and beliefs that affect how victims are interpreted, it is far from the only one. Other terms include “rape supportive attitudes,” “victim blame,” “negative beliefs about victims,” and definitions of “real rape,” or “genuine” or “ideal” victimhood (Bridges 1991; Caricati et al. 2023; Godzisz and Mazurczak 2022; O’Neal 2019; Spears and Spohn 1996; Stevens et al. 2024). Broadening the scope of our review beyond the language of “rape myth” allowed us to create a thick and detailed account of the field.

An effective understanding of victim interpretation across time and terminology will be essential to understand potential remedies to the challenges rape myths pose to the justice system and cultural outcomes. Scholars seem to find evidence of rape myths every time they look for them, but does the content of these rape myths significantly shift? Has awareness of them or attempts to address them had a measurable effect on reducing their impact? To design effective interventions that will affect criminal justice outcomes, we must continue to investigate what shifts the acceptance of rape myths and how. There have been a small number of investigations into whether special training for law enforcement officers can reduce belief in rape myths (Smith et al. 2016). These reveal mixed efficacy for such programs. Similarly, some research suggests the effect of bias on jury decisions can be addressed in part through jury instructions or other means, but evidence remains limited (Willmott and Hudspith 2024; Hudspith et al. 2024). Furthermore, recent works suggest that a reduction in rape myths is not an all‐or‐nothing affair. Certain false beliefs may be reduced while others persist (Hashimi, Reid, and Brown 2025; Richardson et al. 2025). We must further interrogate how and why certain myths persist while others fade. Similarly to new racial ideologies that use “raceless” liberal terms to explain race‐related affairs (Bonilla‐Silva 2014), future research can investigate whether certain rape myths have not decreased but rather shifted, using liberal terms to convey prejudicial, stereotypes or false beliefs about sexual abuse and sexual abuse victims.

Second, while the scope of the field has been methodologically expanding, there is considerable room to grow in terms of the respondent population studied and research methods employed. Approximately 40% of the research on potential jurors and public use of rape myths in our database was done on college students in the U.S. context (with a decent representation from Canada and the United Kingdom as well). The few studies that compare student responses to those of older or less educated populations show mixed results. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence suggesting that we should exercise caution when applying findings from research conducted only in the college context to the general population (Bottoms et al. 2014; Keller and Wiener 2011; Lieberman et al. 2011). Additionally, investigations examining populations outside the U.S. and the U.K. or comparing different cultural contexts were limited in our sample. The smattering of studies we encountered that engage in cross‐cultural analysis indicates that geographic location and cultural context can shape rape myths and associated assumptions and deserve increased attention (Fakunmoju 2022; Pedersen and Strömwall 2013; Bergenfeld et al. 2024).

Methodologically, while vignette studies have been a staple of the field since its conception, some have pointed out that experimental settings are not ideal for examining rape myths in a specific context or observing their use in real‐world settings (Kotanen and Kronstedt 2019). Vignette studies are also limited in revealing how rape myths are internalized or how victims interpret and label themselves and their experiences. We find the increase in attention to non‐experimental settings (such as courtrooms, jury deliberations, and media) and victims' own stories an encouraging and significant trend (Hashimi, Reid, and Brown 2025; Patterson and Cole 2025; Richardson et al. 2025).

Additionally, while the concept of rape mythology grew out of feminist scholarship rooted in the lived experience of women and the complexity of interlocking social identities, as our findings indicate, we still know far more about how bias, false beliefs and rape myths are applied to cisgender straight white women compared to any other victim category. While research suggests there is a relationship between the race of a victim and the endorsement of rape myths, it is underexplored, and research that examines ethnicity as distinct from race remains scarce (Cossins 2003; Johnson et al. 2022; Mariana and McFeely 2019). Only a small (but growing) percentage of publications in our database focus on men or LGBTQ victims, and almost none look at nonbinary or trans individuals (Geoghagan et al. 2025; Ribeiro and Nitschke 2025; Schulze and Koon‐Magnin 2017; Weare et al. 2024). When such populations are included in qualitative studies, they often comprise a small percentage of respondents (Hester and Lilley 2017; McGill and McElvaney 2022).

An intersectional lens (Crenshaw 1989) is particularly helpful in expanding our conceptualization of sexual assault victims. However, only eight articles in our sample (most published within the last decade) explicitly employed intersectionality theory (e.g., Baillot et al. 2009; Chinyere et al. 2022; Mariana and McFeely 2019). Intersectionality's most fundamental principle is the understanding that social inequality is not based on a single factor such as gender or race (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016). It thus serves as a powerful analytic tool which urges us to look at the connection between gender and other identity markers or social locations such as race, class, and sexuality and focuses on survivors and identities existing at the margins of the criminal justice system (Brah and Phoenix 2004; Cho et al. 2013).

An intersectional lens also encourages us to move beyond individual experience and to highlight shared group history and social location (Hill Collins 1998; Moore 2012; Weber 2004). This move is particularly important in the context of sexual assault, bias, and hostile attitudes toward victims and criminal justice outcomes. Crenshaw (1989), for example, emphasized that rape laws do not reflect only male control over female sexuality but rather white male regulation of white female sexuality. As such, it reflects expectations of chastity directed at white women (Brownmiller 1974) and ignores the use of rape as a tool of racial terror (Crenshaw 1989). Hostile attitudes towards black women sexual assault victims should therefore be understood and interpreted within these complex historical contexts, especially around issues of legal procedures and criminal justice outcomes.

Finally, we believe that all these suggestions for future research will be best accomplished as scholars from different disciplines and geographic locations build on the strengths of one another's insights. As sociologists, we were surprised to find that some of the leading sociological journals published few articles relevant to our database. Future research should address sexual assault victim interpretations and rape myths across disciplines, including broadening the terms we use to describe phenomena that align with rape myths.

Further, to achieve interdisciplinary and international cohesion, it is essential to adopt a broad approach to definitions, as we did in this review, to include work that is relevant in content but may use different terms. Since rape myths are entangled in sexism and other systems of power, we need to foster a multidimensional understanding, which looks at victims and their experiences as individuals embedded in complex social systems. Reforms can lead to localized change in criminal justice outcomes; however, to bring about a more profound change that will eliminate the justice gap, interdisciplinary work is needed.

5. Conclusion

Examinations of sexual assault victim interpretations and rape myths have been steadily proceeding over the past 5 decades. This analysis of a broad sample of the field highlights the depth and consistency of key trends; some of the most significant of which are the enduring link between rape myths and gender, the need to understand how rape myths are employed by and towards diverse populations, and the need to explore whether and how rape myths might change or remain constant across time and context. This review also highlights the widespread and profound impact of these biased and hostile attitudes toward sexual assault victims have on criminal justice processes and outcomes.

This review has some limitations, primarily in its methodology and the specificity of findings. First, by starting our search with key articles and journals to build our sample, it is inevitable that we will miss some journals or articles that would have met our inclusion criteria but were not well cross‐referenced in relation to the rest of the sample or were published in journals with lower impact factors. Nevertheless, by relying on cross‐referencing to build our sample, we are confident our database represents scholarly conversation across key elements of the field. Future work can build on this contribution by identifying additional areas of study that can contribute to this broader conversation. Second, because this article aims to describe the broad contours of the field, our findings might lack specificity for some readers. However, given space and word limitations, a description of all minutiae does not align with our goal of presenting an overview of the field. We see this piece as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, the many excellent reviews that examine specific areas of inquiry into rape myths and victim interpretation (e.g., Ribeiro and Nitschke 2025; Russell and Hand 2017; Turchik and Edwards 2012). As we continue to understand how sexual assault victims are interpreted in our society, including the effect of rape myths on our lives and institutions, this review demonstrates key questions for scholars and policymakers to consider.

Author Contributions

Elizabeth Trudeau and Ruth Carmi collaborated on all stages of data collection, analysis, and writing.

Funding

The authors have nothing to report.

Ethics Statement

This research was secondary analysis and did not involve human subjects. It complies with the journal's guidelines on human subject research.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Data Availability Statement

A full list of articles and journals used in this review will be provided by the authors upon request.