Supporting capital punishment for rape offenders as a collective retaliation against honour threat

Abstract

AbstractAmbivalent sexism and related issues such as rape myths and gendered social norms serve to maintain structural gender inequalities. Exploring the implications of benevolent and hostile sexism separately in social practice, such as retaliatory acts in honour cultures, is essential for understanding gender‐based violence and inequalities. Although a vast majority of research focused on direct and interpersonal aggressive response or retaliatory acts against the honour threat in honour cultures, little is known about subtler collective social processes in honour‐damaging situations. To address the gap in our understanding of how retaliatory responses are carried out against honour threat in a subtler and collective way, we focused on the rising demands for reinstatement of the death penalty to stop the increased rates of sexual violence in Turkey as a collective retaliatory response against honour‐threat. To test this argument, we conducted a survey study with 450 participants to examine the role of ambivalent sexism, the gendered norms of honour culture, and rape myths in supporting the death penalty for rape offenders in Turkey. The results indicate that ambivalent sexism and honour culture's gendered norms predicted support for capital punishment. Furthermore, hostile sexism moderated the relationship between rape myth acceptance and support for death penalty. We find that individuals who have high hostile sexism and strong rape myth acceptance do not support capital punishment. These findings contribute to our understanding of the social mechanisms related to hostile and benevolent sexism which results in support for the death penalty in Turkey.