Sexual Assault Gossip: Who Do We Share with and Why?

Abstract

Despite its bad reputation, gossip plays an important role in communicating and policing the social norms, morals, and values of a community. People are likely to be particularly attuned to gossip that helps solve recurrent adaptive challenges. Among women, sexual assault is a pervasive threat to reproductive choice that exacts serious costs on women's reproductive fitness. Research has demonstrated that women fear sexual assault and are motivated to engage in behaviors to reduce the threat of being victimized. Here we propose that women may gossip about sexual assault as a means of protecting themselves and others. Participants read a series of vignettes describing instances of sexual assault of a female victim and were asked to indicate how likely they would be to share that information with a variety of recipients, and what factors motivated their sharing intentions. Results indicated that, overall, sexual assault gossip was especially likely to be shared with proximal female family and friends, as well as authority figures. Women were more likely to share sexual assault gossip than men, and this gender effect was strongest when sharing gossip with female family and friends. The strongest motivations for sharing gossip were to warn the recipient, damage the reputation of the perpetrator, and check agreement with the recipient, with women being more motivated to damage the perpetrator's reputation than men were. Women who expressed a greater fear of rape were more likely to share the information with all recipients except proximal male friends, and reported stronger motivations to share in order to damage the perpetrator's reputation and check agreement with the recipient. Results are consistent with the idea that women may use gossip to create a whisper-network of information exchange that helps women protect themselves and others.