Victim-blaming Social Norms and Violence Against Women: Correcting Misperceptions or Morality Drive Policy and Behavior Change?

Abstract

Intimate Partner Violence entails high socioeconomic and psychological costs; yet it persists globally. Are prevailing victim-blaming norms responsible? How can we shift them and enact policy and behavioral change? To answer these questions, we conducted a survey experiment with a representative sample of Turkish citizens (N=3,600), employing both a within- and a between-subjects design. In the latter, we make victim-blaming norms salient only by incentivizing the elicitation of participants' second-order beliefs about others --but provide no other information; in the former, we provide them with misperception-correcting information regarding these norms. We find that correcting misperceptions led to less victim-blaming, reflecting a re-anchoring effect from overly pessimistic perceptions (62% overestimate), but did not affect policy and behavior. In contrast, priming the salience of norms led to significant policy and behavior changes (including higher donations for victim support) by participants who self-assess as being less victim-blaming (58% in our sample) compared to their perception of society on average. These, self-enhancing, relative moral comparisons acted as “behavioral subsidies” that license action. The implication of attitudes and behavior having different anchors is that, while social change --and stigma reduction-- are long-term processes, welfare-improving policy and behavior changes are feasible even in the short-run.

Keywords: gender-based violence, social norms, policy, victim-blaming, information, morality, survey experiment

JEL Classification: D83, D91, I31, J12, J16, Z13