The Unintended Consequences of Rape Disclosure: The Effects of Disclosure Content, Listener Gender, and Year in College on Listener's Reactions.

Rape is prevalent on American college campuses. Rape survivors often disclose their experience to their peers in hope of receiving support and obtaining justice (i.e., the intended consequences of disclosure). Yet, rape disclosures may also lead to unintended consequences, such as stigma. How peers react to survivors' disclosures of rape greatly influences survivors' recovery and their decision to press charges against their perpetrators. In this article, we explore gender differences in responses to rape disclosures. Using an experimental design ( = 391), we investigate reactions to stigmatizing (versus nonstigmatizing) rape disclosures. We find that, when controlling for the experimental condition, college men stigmatize the rape survivor more than college women. However, in response to a stigmatizing (versus nonstigmatizing) rape disclosure, college women who have been in college longer, compared with college men, have more stigmatizing reactions toward the person disclosing that information. Their reactions then predict increased social distance between the recipient of the disclosure and rape survivors.