There is strong evidence that social attitudes affect conduct in the legal and justice systems, infecting them with myths and stereotypes common in general society ( Rumney, 2009 Page, 2010 Willmott et al., 2018 Shechory-Bitton and Jaeger, 2019). The findings show that while neutrality and objectivity are stressed in these domains, real-life circumstances often suggest a different more biased reality. The negligible research that has explored this topic in law enforcement and the justice system focused mainly on police officer perceptions of rape incidents (see, for example, Sleath and Bull, 2012, 2015 Shechory-Bitton and Jaeger, 2019). ![]() This is extremely significant in cases of sexual abuse, where the legal system must often decide between the version of the victim and that of the perpetrator ( Shechory-Bitton and Jaeger, 2019). Recognition of factors that might bias human perception has crucial significance in the forensic domain with regard to interrogating witnesses and suspects and reaching legal decisions ( Kassin et al., 2013 Peer and Gamliel, 2013 Shechory-Bitton and Zvi, 2015, 2016). Due to embarrassment, concern of encountering distrust and concern of blame attribution, many men avoid reporting sexual offenses perpetrated against them, both slight and serious, to the authorities ( Turchik and Edwards, 2012 Hammond et al., 2017). Under-reporting is even more prevalent when the victims are men ( Javaid, 2018). Many victims refrain from reporting the assault against them to the legal authorities due to the fear of not being believed and the fear of the stigma often attached to sex crime victims, which add to feelings of shame, embarrassment, degradation, guilt, and self-blame ( Perilloux et al., 2014 Landström et al., 2016). The attitude of society in general, and of the law enforcement system in particular, is strongly linked to how victims cope with assaults perpetrated against them ( Venema, 2016 Shaw et al., 2017 Debowska et al., 2018a Boduszek et al., 2019a Craig et al., 2020), and this is particularly true of the psychological and physiological consequences suffered by victims of sex offenses ( Willness et al., 2007 Dworkin et al., 2017 Boduszek et al., 2019b). Gender-related stereotypes and sociocultural explanations are discussed. The findings indicate discriminatory judgments of SH based on gender. No correlation between BJW and perceiving the vignette as SH and blame attribution was found. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that lawyers were less biased than students, manifested in less victim-blame and higher perpetrator blame attributions. Gender bias was also evident in the examination of blame attributions, which were higher toward a male (vs. Both lawyers and students were more inclined to regard the behavior as SH when the vignette description depicted the perpetrator as a man (i.e., female victim) than as a woman (male victim). ![]() Results showed that both lawyers and students agreed that the described event comprised SH, yet gender bias was evident. The respondents were presented with case descriptions of SH that were identical in all aspects but the perpetrator and victim’s gender (alternately depicted as male/female and female/male). Also examined was the correlation between these perceptions and belief in a just world (BJW) hypothesis. The current study used a cross-sectional, comparative, independent measures design. This study examined differences between lawyers ( n = 91) and undergraduate students ( n = 120) regarding their evaluation of behavior as sexual harassment (SH) and blame attributions toward offender and victim. Department of Criminology, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel.
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