The following uses a layman’s grasp of Bob Altemeyer’s research and may ignore other relevant psychology.
From what I can tell, then, the greatest risk of rape within a given environment—indeed the greatest risk of any violence directed against traditionally low-status people—comes from two groups. The larger of the two tends to think in a relatively rational manner. Members of this group see themselves as maximizing what they perceive as benefit to themselves. The rapists among them judge, often correctly, that they can get away with it. They know a woman who reports rape will, empirically, have to face embarrassing questions and accusations of sluttiness regardless of her behavior. (After the fact one can always find ways that someone might have theoretically avoided rape; other women will tend to look for such ways in order to distinguish themselves from the victim and reduce their own fear and/or increase their own status.) A police officer using the word “slutty” to describe rape victims provides further evidence of this.
The smaller but more violent group resembles the first in certain ways but likes to think of itself as traditionally ‘moral’. As you might expect, this group tends to think less rationally. Its members tend to get the poor thinking and self-righteousness of those Altemeyer calls “authoritarian followers” without their tendency to follow the law. They value agreement with the community as a goal in itself (more than others do, I mean). If they think they see authority figures saying that a certain woman has broken the rules and deserves condemnation, they will not hear anything that follows about the woman not deserving X. Or rather, they will think that part applies to other people and not themselves, not the courageous people who need to enforce the rules because nobody else will do it.
We can therefore expect meta-condemnation of traditional bigotry and all that resembles it to reduce ‘traditional’ violence in general and rape in particular. Now the numbers I found on this topic confuse me, but we do have some evidence of good results from feminists’ fabled ‘lack of humor’.
The following uses a layman’s grasp of Bob Altemeyer’s research and may ignore other relevant psychology.
From what I can tell, then, the greatest risk of rape within a given environment—indeed the greatest risk of any violence directed against traditionally low-status people—comes from two groups. The larger of the two tends to think in a relatively rational manner. Members of this group see themselves as maximizing what they perceive as benefit to themselves. The rapists among them judge, often correctly, that they can get away with it. They know a woman who reports rape will, empirically, have to face embarrassing questions and accusations of sluttiness regardless of her behavior. (After the fact one can always find ways that someone might have theoretically avoided rape; other women will tend to look for such ways in order to distinguish themselves from the victim and reduce their own fear and/or increase their own status.) A police officer using the word “slutty” to describe rape victims provides further evidence of this.
The smaller but more violent group resembles the first in certain ways but likes to think of itself as traditionally ‘moral’. As you might expect, this group tends to think less rationally. Its members tend to get the poor thinking and self-righteousness of those Altemeyer calls “authoritarian followers” without their tendency to follow the law. They value agreement with the community as a goal in itself (more than others do, I mean). If they think they see authority figures saying that a certain woman has broken the rules and deserves condemnation, they will not hear anything that follows about the woman not deserving X. Or rather, they will think that part applies to other people and not themselves, not the courageous people who need to enforce the rules because nobody else will do it.
We can therefore expect meta-condemnation of traditional bigotry and all that resembles it to reduce ‘traditional’ violence in general and rape in particular. Now the numbers I found on this topic confuse me, but we do have some evidence of good results from feminists’ fabled ‘lack of humor’.