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Development and Validation of the Secondary Victimization Scale
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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Sexual violence is ubiquitous in the history of human relationships, with the victim being
perceived as responsible for their own misfortune. This phenomenon is labelled
secondary victimization and is manifested in blaming, minimizing the suffering, and
avoiding the victim. This article presents evidence of the validity of a scale that measures
individual differences in these three types of secondary victimization of rape victims. In
Study 1, we developed the scale items and analyzed their content validity. In Study 2, we
carried out an exploratory analysis of its factorial structure and verified the set-up of
the items in three theoretically predicted factors (blaming, minimizing the suffering, and
avoiding the victim), which had convergent validity with the Rape Myth Acceptance
Scale, and discriminant validity with the Big Five Personality Traits, in addition to having
concurrent validity with the Belief in a Just World Scale (BJWS). In Study 3, we
confirmed this tri-factor structure using confirmatory analysis. In Study 4, we analyzed
the predictive validity of the Secondary Victimization Scale (SVS), proposing the hypothesis
that secondary victimization mediates the effect of BJWS on the participants’
behavior towards a rape victim. The summary of the results shows consistent evidence
of the SVS’s validity.
Description
Keywords
Sexual violence Secondary victimization Belief in a just world Rape Violence Justice
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Tavares, S. M., Pimentel, C. E., Paiva, T. T., Pereira, C. R. (2023). Development and Validation of the Secondary Victimization Scale. Psychological Reports, 126(5), pp. 2594-2615 (First Published April 26 2022)