Mental retardation and adult women's perceptions of adolescent sexual abuse

Abstract

This study examined the effect of mental retardation and an adolescent girl's behavior on adult women's perceptions of sexual abuse and the girl's responsibility. Subjects were 288 women, age 18 to 33, who were randomly assigned a vignette describing a sexual encounter between an adolescent girl and boy. Girl's diagnosis (mentally retarded or nonretarded), boy's diagnosis (mentally retarded or nonretarded) and girl's behavior (encouraging, passive, or resisting) were experimentally manipulated. Factor analysis of responses yielded three factors: girl's responsibility, boy's abusiveness, and parents' responsibility. Results indicate that subjects perceive the girl's responsibility differently among girls with and without mental retardation. Regardless of her behavior, subjects perceive the girl as bearing little responsibility when she is retarded. However, when she is nonretarded, she bears more responsibility when she is encouraging than when she is passive or resisting, and she bears greater responsibility when she is passive than when she is resisting. Also, when the girl is encouraging, the boy's perceived sexual abusiveness is less when he is mentally retarded than when he is nonretarded. Finally, parents are assigned greatest responsibility when the girl is passive, regardless of her diagnosis.