The Effect of Mental Health Stigmas on Believability, Attributions of Blame, Sentence Length Prescription, and Verdict Determinations in Sexual Assault Cases

Pogue, Rachel

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

The Effect of Mental Health Stigmas on Believability, Attributions of Blame, Sentence Length Prescription, and Verdict Determinations in Sexual Assault Cases Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/w9505183v

Abstract

This research attempts to address the under-explained question of how mental health stigmas
impact outcomes and perceptions in sexual assault cases involving a female victim and a male perpetrator.
The research involves a survey experiment that gauged how factors such as believability were impacted
by a variety of common mental health conditions. In total, 700 people participated in a survey experiment
administered through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The survey experiment provided respondents with a
hypothetical sexual assault case and the victim’s mental health condition was manipulated across the
treatment groups. The experiment randomly assigned each participant one of the five treatment groups
(control, depression, bipolar disorder, drug abuse, and psychosis) and gauged their responses to questions
regarding the victim’s believability, attributions of blame, sentence length prescription, and verdict
determinations. This research found that the introduction of mental illness significantly decreased the
victim’s believability, defendant responsibility, sentence length prescriptions, and guilty verdict
determinations; it also increased victim responsibility. Depression had the smallest impact on the
measures, with the differences between this treatment group and the control group being statistically
significant in all but one measure. Bipolar disorder, drug abuse, and psychosis had a statistically
significant impact on all of the measures. There was a gender impact in one of the measures, victim
responsibility, and women blamed the victim more than men did. In summary, this research finds that
mental health stigmas have a massive impact on outcomes and perceptions in sexual assault cases. This
research adds important knowledge to this body of literature, as very little research has been conducted on
the impact of a victim, not a defendant, having a mental condition in criminal proceedings.

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