ABSTRACT
When an individual experiences a negative life event, such as an accident, illness, or bereavement, others typically respond with compassion and sympathy to his or her plight. For a woman who has been raped, the situation is often dramatically different. Rather than receiving the comfort and support dearly needed after a traumatizing experience such as rape, she may find that many people around her treat her claim with suspicion and challenge her status as victim of a sexual assault. The idea that many, if not most, rape victims precipitate the attack through their behavior or appearance and thus have to accept at least part of the responsibility for what happened is firmly ingrained in the common stereotype about the crime and its victims (Katz & Mazur, 1979). For a raped woman this means that she has to come to terms not only with the psychological aftermath of the attack itself but also with "the reactions of people, especially the negative subjective reactions based on the myth and stereotypes that surround the subject of rape" (Burgess, 1987, p. 3).
