Abstract
The #MeToo movement has given voice to victims of sexual harassment and assault. In many of these cases, there have been long delays in reporting of the sexual offence (e.g., the Harvey Weinstein case). The purpose of this study was to examine how the type of sexual offence (harassment vs. assault) and the length of delayed reporting (15, 25, 35 years) influenced mock-juror decision-making. Mock-jurors (N = 319) read a mock trial transcript depicting an alleged sexual offence and were asked to render a dichotomous verdict, continuous guilt rating, and defendant and victim perception ratings. The data indicated an effect of sexual offence type such that mock-jurors held more favorable perceptions of the defendant when the alleged offence was harassment compared with assault. There also was an effect of delayed reporting such that mock-jurors rendered more guilty verdicts when there was a 25-year delay compared with a 15-year delay. Intriguingly, these results suggest that jurors in sexual offence cases may perceive longer delays in reporting as more believable than shorter delays.
Highlights
Victims of sexual crimes are often reluctant to report their victimization, often because of feelings of shame and embarrassment, as well as a fear of not being believed (Sable et al, 2010)
A hierarchical binary logistic regression was conducted to examine the influence of sexual offence type, delay in reporting (15-year delay was used as the reference group), and the product term representing the two-way interaction on mock-jurors’ dichotomous verdicts (0 = not guilty, 1 = guilty)
There was a significant effect of delay, such that mock-jurors were 1.8 times more likely to reach a guilty verdict when there was a 25-year delay compared to a 15-year delay, B = 0.60, SE = 0.28, Wald’s χ2 (1) = 4.65, p = .03, Exp(B) = 1.82, 95% CI [1.06, 3.14]
Summary
Victims of sexual crimes are often reluctant to report their victimization, often because of feelings of shame and embarrassment, as well as a fear of not being believed (Sable et al, 2010). The #MeToo movement erupted in October 2017 as an outlet for social media users to come forward with their experiences of sexual harassment and assault (Rotenberg & Cotter, 2018). In Canada, there was a 13% increase in reporting of sexual crimes following these movements, compared with the previous year (Rotenberg & Cotter, 2018). In October 2017, the month that the #MeToo movement went viral, reports of sexual crimes in Canada were 46% higher than in October of the previous year (Rotenberg & Cotter, 2018)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
