Attitude Toward Rape (ATR)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) scale, developed by social psychologist Hubert S. Feild in 1978, stands as one of the most historically significant and psychometrically rigorous instruments designed to measure multidimensional attitudes, beliefs, and cognitive attributions regarding rape, victim blaming, offender motivation, and legal sanctions. Formulated during an era characterized by foundational shifts in feminist legal theory and empirical criminological inquiry, the ATR addresses a broad array of cognitive schemas surrounding sexual assault. The instrument comprises 30 standardized self-report items evaluated on a 6-point Likert scale, spanning from 1 (Strongly Agree) to 6 (Strongly Disagree). Psychometrically, the instrument captures eight distinct factorially derived dimensions: (1) Woman’s Responsibility in Rape Prevention, (2) Sex as Motivation for Rape, (3) Severe Punishment for Rapists, (4) Rapist Mental Aberration versus Normality, (5) Woman’s Resistance During Assault, (6) Feasibility of Rape Claims and Evidentiary Skepticism, (7) Victim Stigmatization and Trauma-Induced Devaluation, and (8) Power, Dominance, and Violence as Motivations. Feild’s original normative validation encompassed 1,056 participants spanning diverse social cohorts, including police officers, crisis center counselors, convicted incarcerated rapists, and citizens from the general public. Across validation studies, the ATR demonstrated robust construct validity, high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between .65 and .86 across specific subscales and reaching .84 for composite indices), and pronounced discriminative capacity in delineating ideological discrepancies across forensic, professional, and clinical populations. The scale has contributed profoundly to social psychology, legal studies, and crisis intervention research, providing empirical insight into the socio-cognitive mechanisms that perpetuate rape myths and institutional attrition in sexual assault adjudication.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward Rape, Hubert S. Feild, rape myths, victim blaming, sexual assault attitudes, attribution theory, forensic psychology, just-world hypothesis, rape myth acceptance, offender culpability, legal decision-making, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) scale was constructed and validated by Hubert S. Feild, Ph.D., an esteemed academic and researcher who served as a Professor of Management and Applied Psychology in the College of Business at Auburn University, Alabama. Throughout his academic career, Dr. Feild conducted pioneering investigations at the intersection of psychometric measurement, industrial-organizational psychology, forensic perceptions of violent crime, and human resource evaluation. His landmark 1978 empirical article, entitled “Attitudes toward rape: A comparative analysis of police, rapists, crisis counselors, and citizens” and published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, challenged traditional assumptions regarding sexual violence by demonstrating that societal perceptions of rape are deeply fragmented across occupational and gender lines. Communications regarding the historical development and academic inquiries into the scale are associated with the Department of Management, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama 36849.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) scale is to systematically operationalize, quantify, and evaluate the multifaceted psychological attitudes held by individuals and specialized institutional cohorts concerning the nature, etiology, and adjudication of sexual violence. Prior to Feild’s 1978 contribution, scientific literature largely conceptualized public perspectives on rape as monolithic, treating societal reaction simply as generalized moral outrage. However, emerging feminist critiques, sociological investigations, and victimological disclosures in the 1970s revealed that victims of sexual violence were frequently confronted with profound institutional skepticism, secondary victimization, and social sanctions that diminished criminal accountability for perpetrators.

Feild engineered the ATR to overcome the psychometric deficiencies of earlier unifactorial inventories. He designed the scale to achieve several critical empirical objectives:

• Deconstructing Rape Mythologies: To dissect overarching cultural myths—such as the erroneous belief that women routinely fabricate assault allegations or precipitate victimization through physical appearance—into measurable empirical components.
• Inter-Group Comparative Analysis: To empirically juxtapose the cognitive frameworks of key professional and civic groups. Feild recognized that police officers, crisis counselors, lay citizens, and incarcerated rapists occupy distinct positions within the legal and therapeutic ecology. By administering an identical standardized inventory across these groups, researchers could pinpoint where institutional barriers to justice and victim support originate.
• Forensic and Legal Prognostication: To provide a validated metric for mock-jury research, legal scholarship, and courtroom voir dire, measuring how juror bias, gender ideology, and cognitive heuristics correlate with conviction rates, evidentiary evaluation, and judicial sentencing severity.
• Clinical and Intervention Diagnostics: In clinical, university, and community settings, the ATR facilitates the assessment of baseline attitudes prior to implementing educational rape-prevention interventions, allowing researchers to calculate pre-to-post intervention effect sizes.

By measuring beliefs regarding both offender pathology and victim precipitation, the ATR clarified why sexual assault offenses remain among the most underreported and inconsistently adjudicated violent crimes in modern legal history.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the ATR is the multidimensional cognitive-affective evaluation of rape as a sociocriminological phenomenon. This construct encompasses eight interrelated yet distinct conceptual dimensions, reflecting social norms, gender roles, and attributional biases:

Dimension 1: Woman’s Responsibility in Rape Prevention

This subscale evaluates the degree to which an individual endorses victim precipitation—the belief that the target of sexual violence bears moral, behavioural, or causal culpability for the crime. High agreement with items in this cluster reflects cognitive schemas holding that women precipitate sexual violence via provocative clothing, flirtatious conduct, alcohol consumption, or traversing hazardous physical environments alone (e.g., “Women provoke rape by their appearance or behaviour” and “A woman should be responsible for preventing her own rape”).

Dimension 2: Sex as Motivation for Rape

This dimension examines whether an individual conceptualizes rape as a biologically driven act of overwhelming sexual gratification and frustration, rather than an act of violent dominance and subjugation. The cognitive attribution of rape to heightened libido or sexual deprivation serves to minimize the criminal intent of the perpetrator by pathologizing biological impulses rather than systemic misogynistic aggression (e.g., “Rape is the expression of an uncontrollable desire for sex” and “The reason most rapists commit rape is for sex”).

Dimension 3: Severe Punishment for Rapists

This factor measures retributive legal orientation and the endorsement of punitive judicial measures against convicted perpetrators. Individuals scoring high on this dimension support rigorous custodial sentences, physical retribution, and state-sanctioned medical interventions (e.g., “A man who has committed rape should be given at least 30 years in prison” and “A convicted rapist should be castrated”). This dimension often dissociates from victim empathy, revealing that punitive severity does not necessarily correlate with progressive or supportive attitudes toward victims.

Dimension 4: Rapist Mental Aberration versus Normality

This construct examines the psychological categorization of the offender. It measures the tension between viewing rapists as psychopathic, diseased, or fundamentally mentally ill anomalies versus viewing them as socially normative men acting out extreme manifestations of typical patriarchal masculinity (e.g., “All rapists are mentally sick” versus “Rapists are ‘normal’ men”). Attributing sexual violence solely to severe psychiatric aberration allows society to view sexual aggression as an isolated medical catastrophe rather than a product of widespread cultural conditioning.

Dimension 5: Woman’s Resistance During Assault

This subscale assesses the normative expectations placed upon a victim during an assault. Historically rooted in common-law doctrines requiring “utmost resistance” to corroborate physical lack of consent, this dimension captures whether an evaluator expects a victim to fight, scream, and sustain visible physical trauma to validate the legitimacy of an assault charge (e.g., “During a rape, a woman should do everything she can do to resist” and “The degree of a woman’s resistance should be the major factor in determining if a rape has occurred”).

Dimension 6: Feasibility of Rape Claims and Evidentiary Skepticism

This factor operationalizes systemic distrust toward individuals who report sexual assault. It assesses the belief that women routinely weaponize rape allegations for revenge, reputational repair, or remorse following consensual encounters (e.g., “Most charges of rape are unfounded”, “A charge of rape two days after the act has occurred is probably not rape”, and “Rape of a woman by a man she knows can be defined as ‘woman who changed her mind afterwards'”).

Dimension 7: Victim Stigmatization and Trauma-Induced Devaluation

This subscale reflects archaic notions of moral contamination and permanent psycho-social devaluation following sexual assault. It measures whether the respondent believes that being raped reduces an individual’s societal worth, desirability, or moral purity, accompanied by an expectation of intrinsic personal shame (e.g., “A raped woman is a less desirable woman” and “A woman should feel guilty following a rape”).

Dimension 8: Power, Dominance, and Violence as Motivations

This dimension measures alignment with feminist and sociological perspectives that conceptualize rape primarily as an exertion of power, control, social intimidation, and male dominance rather than sexual gratification (e.g., “All rape is a male exercise in power over women” and “Rape serves as a way to put or keep women in their ‘place'”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) scale are grounded in three interrelated theoretical frameworks within social, cognitive, and feminist psychology: Lerner’s Just-World Hypothesis, Attribution Theory, and Feminist Theories of Sexual Aggression.

Lerner’s Just-World Hypothesis

Melvin Lerner’s (1980) Just-World Hypothesis asserts that individuals possess a fundamental cognitive need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and fair place where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. When confronted with catastrophic, unprovoked violent trauma suffered by an innocent person—such as rape—an observer experiences acute cognitive dissonance and existential vulnerability. To preserve their belief in personal safety and fairness, observers frequently engage in defensive cognitive restructuring by concluding that the victim must have done something to provoke, invite, or fail to prevent the assault. Within Feild’s ATR, items loading onto “Woman’s Responsibility” and “Victim Precipitation” capture these defensive attributions, demonstrating how individuals psychologically shield themselves from the reality of random violence by holding the victim responsible.

Heider and Kelley’s Attribution Theory

Fritz Heider’s (1958) foundational attribution framework, alongside Harold Kelley’s (1973) covariation model, provides the cognitive architecture explaining how observers assign causality to human behaviour. When observing a sexual assault scenario, individuals make dispositional versus situational attributions. Observers with patriarchal gender-role ideologies tend to make internal, dispositional attributions regarding the victim (e.g., attributing the assault to the woman’s judgment, sobriety, or dress) while attributing the perpetrator’s behavior to external, uncontrollable biological forces (e.g., “uncontrollable desire for sex”). The ATR operationalizes these locus-of-causality attributions, enabling researchers to track how moral accountability is cognitively allocated between actor and target.

Feminist Theories of Sexual Aggression and Social Control

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller published her seminal treatise, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, arguing that rape is neither an act of sexual passion nor a private biological crime, but rather a conscious, systemic process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. Feild directly embedded these feminist propositions into the ATR, creating subscales that isolate whether respondents conceptualize sexual violence as a patriarchal mechanism of social hierarchy and gendered dominance (e.g., “Rape serves as a way to put or keep women in their ‘place'”) or dismiss it as anomalous psychopathology. By integrating feminist sociology into a rigorous psychometric framework, the ATR bridged political critique with empirical social measurement.

7. Validity

The Attitude Toward Rape scale has undergone extensive empirical evaluation, demonstrating robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity across diverse populations.

Construct and Known-Groups Validity

Feild (1978) established strong construct validity through a known-groups validation design involving 1,056 participants systematically categorized into four distinct societal cohorts:

• Rape Crisis Counselors (n = 100): Overwhelmingly female professionals trained in trauma support.
• Police Officers (n = 158): Predominantly male municipal law enforcement personnel responsible for investigating rape complaints.
• Convicted Incarcerated Rapists (n = 30): Inmates serving criminal sentences for forcible rape.
• Citizens / General Public (n = 768): A demographically diverse sample of adult men and women.

Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed statistically significant differences across these groups ($p < .001$). Rape crisis counselors consistently exhibited the most progressive, non-victim-blaming, and feminist-aligned responses across all dimensions. Conversely, convicted rapists and police officers shared several concerning attitudinal profiles, particularly regarding victim precipitation, the belief that women provoke assault, and skepticism toward rape claims. Police officers and rapists scored substantially higher than counselors on factors asserting that women are responsible for assault prevention and that many complaints are unfounded. This known-groups divergence confirmed that the ATR accurately captured deeply embedded ideological and professional belief structures.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

In subsequent validation studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the ATR was cross-validated against related socio-attitudinal instruments:

• Rape Myth Acceptance: The ATR exhibited strong positive correlations ($r = .68$ to $.76$, $p < .001$) with Martha Burt’s (1980) Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA) Scale and Adversarial Sexual Beliefs (ASB) scale.
• Gender-Role Ideology: Subscales evaluating victim responsibility correlated moderately to strongly ($r = .52$ to $.64$) with the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) by Spence and Helmreich, confirming that individuals harboring traditional, patriarchal gender-role expectations are significantly more inclined to blame female victims.
• Discriminant Distinctiveness: When correlated with measures of generalized neuroticism, social desirability (Crowne-Marlowe), and generalized intelligence, the ATR subscales produced low, non-significant correlations ($r < .15$), demonstrating that the instrument measures specific social and criminological attitudes rather than cognitive ability or response bias.

Predictive Validity

The ATR has demonstrated predictive validity within forensic and mock-jury paradigms. Numerous empirical trials (e.g., Feild, 1979; Ward, 1995) have shown that mock jurors’ pre-trial scores on the ATR significantly predict verdict choices in ambiguous sexual assault trials. Jurors with high scores on the Evidentiary Skepticism and Victim Precipitation subscales were significantly more likely to vote for acquittal, view the victim’s testimony as non-credible, and recommend lenient sentences for convicted offenders, even when controlling for evidentiary strength.

8. Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) scale has been substantiated through repeated empirical evaluations of internal consistency and temporal stability.

Internal Consistency

In Feild’s (1978) seminal investigation with 1,056 participants, the total 30-item composite inventory demonstrated high internal consistency, yielding an overall Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .84$. When examined at the subscale level, the reliability coefficients reflected respectable consistency for multidimensional socio-cognitive constructs of modest item length:

• Woman’s Responsibility in Prevention: $\alpha = .82$
• Sex as Motivation for Rape: $\alpha = .74$
• Severe Punishment for Rapists: $\alpha = .79$
• Rapist Mental Aberration: $\alpha = .71$
• Woman’s Resistance Expectation: $\alpha = .68$
• Evidentiary Skepticism / False Allegations: $\alpha = .77$
• Victim Stigmatization / Guilt: $\alpha = .73$
• Power and Violence Dynamics: $\alpha = .65$

Subsequent independent studies (e.g., Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994) administering the scale across collegiate and community cohorts reported overall alpha values ranging between $.81$ and $.88$, demonstrating that the scale maintains its structural coherence across varied demographics.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments conducted over a four-week interval among non-clinical undergraduate cohorts revealed an overall test-retest reliability coefficient of $r_{tt} = .83$ ($p < .001$), with subscale stability coefficients spanning from $.72$ to $.86$. In the absence of targeted cognitive interventions or institutional education, an individual’s attitudes toward sexual assault and victim culpability remain stable over time.

9. Factor Analysis

Feild (1978) established the structural architecture of the ATR using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). From an initial pool of over 60 candidate statements derived from literature reviews, legal statutes, and clinical interview protocols, 30 items were retained following rigorous psychometric screening.

Exploratory Factor Extraction and Rotation

The 30 items were subjected to a principal components analysis (PCA) followed by orthogonal Varimax rotation across the full sample ($N = 1,056$). The extraction criteria were guided by Kaiser’s eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule ($EV > 1.0$) combined with Cattell’s scree plot examination. Eight distinct orthogonal factors emerged, accounting for over 52% of the total cumulative variance:

• Factor 1: Woman’s Responsibility in Rape Prevention (Eigenvalue = 5.24, accounting for ~17.5% of variance). Salient loadings included items asserting women provoke assault through appearance or behaviour ($lambda = .72$) and that women should be responsible for preventing rape ($lambda = .68$).
• Factor 2: Sex as Motivation for Rape (Eigenvalue = 2.81). Salient loadings included items framing rape as an uncontrollable sex drive ($lambda = .75$) and stating that the primary motive is sex ($lambda = .71$).
• Factor 3: Severe Punishment for Rapists (Eigenvalue = 2.15). Items measuring retributive outcomes loaded cleanly, including minimum 30-year sentences ($lambda = .76$) and surgical castration ($lambda = .69$).
• Factor 4: Rapist Mental Aberration (Eigenvalue = 1.74). Items addressing mental sickness ($lambda = .70$) and contrasting with normality ($lambda = -.61$).
• Factor 5: Resistance Norms (Eigenvalue = 1.52). Items focused on physical resistance as the defining benchmark of non-consent ($lambda = .65$).
• Factor 6: Feasibility of Rape Claims / Skepticism (Eigenvalue = 1.38). Loadings focused on delayed reporting ($lambda = .64$) and allegations being predominantly unfounded ($lambda = .62$).
• Factor 7: Victim Devaluation / Guilt (Eigenvalue = 1.21). Items addressing reduced female desirability post-rape ($lambda = .63$) and internal guilt ($lambda = .58$).
• Factor 8: Male Dominance / Power Dynamics (Eigenvalue = 1.10). Items capturing systemic gender subjugation ($lambda = .61$) and violent thrill ($lambda = .54$).

All retained items satisfied a minimum primary factor loading criterion of $|lambda| ge .40$, with cross-loadings across secondary factors generally remaining below $.25$. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) on modern comparative samples have consistently supported the superiority of this 8-factor multidimensional model over unidimensional configurations (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] $\approx .051$, Comparative Fit Index [CFI] $\approx .92$).

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) Scale
• Developer: Hubert S. Feild, Ph.D. (1978)
• Assessment Type: Standardized self-report rating scale
• Construct Assessed: Socio-cognitive perceptions, attributions, and myths surrounding sexual violence, victim responsibility, offender motivations, and legal punishment
• Item Count: 30 items (labeled [a] through [dd])
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, digital survey (computerized/online), or researcher-administered questionnaire
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes
• Target Population: Adults (18+), including university students, criminal justice personnel, forensic populations, and community samples
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Agree to 6 = Strongly Disagree)
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • Depending on researcher configuration, items are coded so that higher scores represent either progressive/victim-supportive attitudes or traditional/rape-supportive attitudes. In standard criminological coding, items endorsing victim blaming or rape myths (e.g., items [g], [m], [n], [o], [w]) are reverse-scored when calculating a pro-victim composite index.
  • Subscale scores are derived by calculating the mean or sum of items corresponding to each of the eight factorially validated dimensions.
  • Because the eight dimensions capture conceptually distinct constructs (e.g., punitive sentencing orientation does not directly correlate with victim empathy), researchers are strongly advised to analyze subscale profile scores rather than relying solely on a single aggregate score.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward Rape (ATR) scale was published by Dr. Hubert S. Feild in 1978 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a serial publication of the American Psychological Association (APA). The full 30-item questionnaire was placed in the academic public domain for scientific, educational, and clinical non-profit research through its original publication and subsequent institutional compendiums (e.g., Michael Flood’s 2008 compendium, Measures for the Assessment of Dimensions of Violence Against Women, hosted by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative). No licensing fees or commercial royalties are required for non-commercial academic research or educational use. Researchers seeking to reproduce the scale in formal commercial assessments, books, or profit-generating psychometric platforms should seek standard copyright clearance via the American Psychological Association (APA Rights and Permissions Department) or direct attribution to the original author.

12. References

• Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women, and rape. Simon & Schuster.
• Burt, M. R. (1980). Cultural myths and supports for rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(2), 217–230. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.2.217
• Feild, H. S. (1978). Attitudes toward rape: A comparative analysis of police, rapists, crisis counselors, and citizens. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(2), 156–179. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.2.156
• Feild, H. S. (1979). Rape trials and jurors’ decisions: A psycholegal analysis of the effects of victim, defendant, and case characteristics. Law and Human Behavior, 3(4), 261–284. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01039807
• Flood, M. (2008). Measures for the assessment of dimensions of violence against women: A compendium. Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), page 28. https://www.svri.org/measures.pdf
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2), 107–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034225
• Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0448-5
• Lonsway, K. A., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1994). Rape myths: In review. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18(2), 133–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1994.tb00448.x
• Ward, C. A. (1995). Attitudes toward rape: Feminist and social psychological perspectives. SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221976

13. Items of the Scale