Rape Appraisals: Class Mobility, Social Geography, and Sexual Morality Tales in Ghana, South Africa, and Rwanda

Abstract

Interdisciplinary scholarship in violence and trauma studies suggest that a person’s interpretation of stressful events contours how the person will respond. It is through the two-part appraisal process that survivors determine how they will cope. This project utilizes an identity-based approach to demonstrate that survivors use group-based ideologies such as social class, geography, gender, sexuality, and, for some, race to appraise their accounts of violence, assess their coping strategies, and manage traumatic events. Using the cross-cultural accounts of 146 Black Ghanaian, South African, and Rwandan women rape survivors, the findings extend the appraisal approach by highlighting how survivors in this study utilized sexual morality tales to construct a variety of appraisal accounts to interpret their assaults and to justify their coping strategies. I call these appraisals opportunities, possibilities, limitations, and solidarities. These differing appraisals demonstrated that social milieu contours the psychological experience of violence and can engender both parallel and divergent interpretations across social class and cultural contexts. Last, the implications of these findings for comparative sexual assault studies, theories of traumatic coping, gender and development, and intersectionality are discussed.