"Put yourself in her shoes, it might change your attitudes". manipulating empathy to improve attitudes toward rape victims

Victim blaming and stigmatization are significant problem for rape victims' well-being and healing. Taking others' perspective has shown to improve attitudes toward stigmatized groups. This study investigated attitudes toward rape victims after manipulating empathy to 240 young adults from Kosovo and 240 from Turkey. Attitudes toward wartime rape victims remain understudied despite being a very important and sensitive problem in the case of Kosovo. Participants responded to demographic form and Ambivalent Sexism Inventory to measure Benevolent Sexism (BS) and Hostile Sexism (HS). They were randomly assigned to the low empathy (be objective) or high empathy group (put yourself in the victim's place). Participants randomly read one of the four scenarios that were manipulated as taken place in a non-war situation (daytime vs. nighttime) and in a war situation (daytime vs. nighttime). They reported their emotions on a list with 12 emotional state adjectives including empathy. Lastly, responded to Attitudes toward Rape Victims Scale (ARVS). Kosovar participants scored higher on ARVS, as compared to Turkish participants. The High Empathy group showed significantly fewer negative attitudes toward rape victims. However, there was no significant difference among scenario groups on the ARVS score. The results showed that there was significant interaction effect between Empathy and Scenario, when age and gender were also controlled. As expected, HS and BS showed significant positive correlation, whereas self-reported empathy negative correlation with ARVS. Self-reported empathy, HS and BS were significant predictors of participants' ARVS. The main contributions of this thesis are (1)sample from a country with war-rape history(Kosovo) and one with no such history(Turkey); (2)wartime scenarios; (3)manipulation of empathy to improve attitudes. This thesis suggests that awareness programs with a focus on empathy might improve attitudes toward rape victims. Keywords: attitudes toward rape victims, rape myths, empathy, hostile and benevolent sexism