No dia 20 de março, Lúcia Campos (Iscte-IUL) será a oradora convidada de um Seminário do Grupo de Investigação SPARC sobre o tema Moral typecasting and perceptions of victims and perpetrators of sexual assault: the role of gender stereotypes. A partir das 14h30, na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.

We often picture a rape victim as a woman, who is victimised by an unknown man, with non-stereotypical sexual assault victims (i.e., anything other than a female victim of a male stranger) being often further victimised: more blame is put on male than female victims, and the assault is seen as less severe and damaging. However, although the stereotypical sexual assault is more often reported, recent studies have shown a greater prevalence of non-stereotypical cases than previously thought. We propose that these biases may be explained by the Moral Typecasting Theory, that states that a moral action has a moral agent, who is responsible for the action, and a moral patient, who is the sufferer of the action, which overlaps with gender stereotypes. Three experimental studies have been conducted, to assess the presence of Moral Typecasting of rape victims and perpetrators and its effect on perceptions of the crime, the victim, and the perpetrator; we also investigated the moderating role of participants’ intraindividual variables in this effect. The findings resulting from these studies will be presented and discussed in light of the Moral Typecasting Theory.

Lúcia Campos has a BSc in Psychology, a Post-Grad in Data Analysis in Social Sciences and a MSc in Social and Organizational Psychology, with a thesis on Social Psychology of Gender (Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa). Between 2017 and 2022, she worked as a research assistant in FCT funded research projects on Iscte and ICS-ULisboa. Since 2021, she is enrolled in a PhD program in Psychology at Iscte; her project is focused on socially critical decisions towards non-stereotypical rape victims (funded by FCT: Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia).