Rape Myth Scale (RAM)

Abstract

The Rape Myth Scale (RAM), conceptualized and validated by Kimberly A. Lonsway and Louise F. Fitzgerald (1994, 1995), is an empirically derived, 19-item psychometric instrument designed to assess individual adherence to rape myths—defined as prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about sexual assault, victim behavior, and perpetrator culpability. Developed in response to psychometric and conceptual limitations in early measures such as Martha Burt’s (1980) Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA) scale, the RAM provides an updated, psychometrically sound index capturing the multifaceted socio-cognitive justifications used to minimize, excuse, or normalize male sexual violence against women. The scale uses a standard Likert-type response format, typically ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree), yielding a composite score where higher values reflect greater rape myth acceptance. Psychometric evaluations across diverse collegiate, community, and forensic samples reveal high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .88 and .93) and robust construct validity. Factor-analytic investigations confirm a strong general factor alongside coherent thematic sub-dimensions, including victim precipitation, perpetrator exoneration, denial of injury/resistance, skepticism regarding allegations, and racialized stereotypes. The RAM has become a cornerstone in feminist psychology, criminology, and socio-legal research, serving as a reliable predictor of victim-blaming attributions, mock juror decision-making, and self-reported sexually aggressive behavior.

Keywords

Rape Myth Scale, Rape Myth Acceptance, Kimberly A. Lonsway, Louise F. Fitzgerald, sexual assault, victim blaming, hostile sexism, forensic psychology, sexual violence, psychometrics

Authors

The scale was developed by two prominent scholars in feminist psychology and legal-psychological studies:

• Kimberly A. Lonsway, Ph.D.: Research Director at End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI), formerly affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Lonsway is an internationally recognized researcher and consultant on criminal justice responses to sexual violence, law enforcement training, and victim advocacy.
• Louise F. Fitzgerald, Ph.D.: Professor Emerita of Psychology and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Fitzgerald is a pioneering researcher in the conceptualization and measurement of sexual harassment, workplace violence, and the psychological sequelae of gender-based victimization.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Rape Myth Scale (RAM) is to quantitatively capture the cognitive structures, belief systems, and social attitudes that serve to legitimize, excuse, or deny sexual violence against women. In the early 1970s and 1980s, foundational research by Martha Burt and other feminist scholars demonstrated that cultural attitudes toward rape play a definitive role in perpetuating sexual assault, discouraging victims from reporting crimes, and systematically impeding justice within legal systems. However, early inventories suffered from several methodological challenges: outdated vernacular, multidimensional confounding with general conservative gender-role adherence, and inadequate psychometric factor stability.

Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1994, 1995) undertook a comprehensive theoretical and empirical reexamination to construct an instrument that adhered strictly to a clear conceptual definition: rape myths as “attitudes and generally false beliefs that are widely and persistently held, and that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women” (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994, p. 134). The RAM was engineered to operationalize this specific construct without being conflated with broader, non-assault-specific gender ideologies.

The applications of the RAM span multiple domains:

• Empirical and Sociological Research: To track population-level prevalence of victim-blaming ideologies and identify the socio-cognitive correlates of gender-based violence.
• Forensic and Legal Psychology: To examine juror bias during voir dire, mock jury trial simulations, and judicial decision-making regarding consent, victim credibility, and perpetrator liability.
• Intervention and Prevention Evaluation: To evaluate the efficacy of campus bystander intervention programs, sexual assault prevention workshops, and criminal justice training curricula aimed at law enforcement officers, healthcare professionals, and prosecutors.
• Clinical and Offender Assessment: In correctional and clinical forensic contexts, to evaluate cognitive distortions among adjudicated sex offenders, tracking treatment progress and cognitive restructuring within rehabilitation programs.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the RAM is Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA). Far from being random misperceptions, rape myths are functional cultural heuristics that provide cognitive protection against the uncomfortable reality of sexual violence. By delegitimizing the victim or framing the assault as an unavoidable misunderstanding, rape myths support an illusion of personal invulnerability and preserve the belief in a safe, predictable world. The RAM captures five key conceptual facets within this overarching construct:

1. Victim Blaming and Precipitation

This dimension encompasses beliefs asserting that women invite, provoke, or bear causal responsibility for their victimization through their attire, flirtation, intoxication, or lifestyle choices (e.g., Item 1: “When women talk and act sexy, they are inviting rape”; Item 4: “Many rapes happen because women lead men on”). Drawing on the just-world hypothesis, these items measure the cognitive tendency to assign culpability to the victim rather than the perpetrator, thereby reducing existential anxiety regarding personal vulnerability.

2. Perpetrator Exoneration and Biological Determinism

This facet captures beliefs that minimize perpetrator intent, framing sexual aggression as an uncontrollable physiological drive or an unintended consequence of male sexual frustration (e.g., Item 5: “Men don’t usually intend to force sex on a woman, but sometimes they get too sexually carried away”; Item 13: “When men rape, it is because of their strong desire for sex”). These items operationalize the “male sexual drive discourse,” which excuses violence by conceptualizing men as passive agents governed by unmanageable evolutionary and hormonal impulses.

3. Disbelief and Allegation Fabrication

This component measures institutional and personal skepticism regarding the veracity of rape claims, reflecting the stereotype that women frequently make false accusations out of spite, shame, or regret (e.g., Item 18: “Many so-called rape victims are actually women who had sex and ‘changed their minds’ afterwards”; Item 12: “Women tend to exaggerate how much rape affects them”). This cognitive distortion directly impedes victim reporting and institutional adjudication.

4. Real Rape Stereotypes (Resistance and Injury Demands)

These items reflect rigid, outdated legal and social standards concerning what constitutes “genuine” sexual assault, asserting that authentic rape must involve overt physical violence, sustained physical resistance, and visible bodily trauma (e.g., Item 8: “If a woman doesn’t physically fight back, you can’t really say that it was a rape”; Item 9: “A rape probably didn’t happen if the woman has no bruises or marks”). Such myths ignore widespread trauma responses such as tonic immobility and psychological freezing.

5. Racialized and Socio-Demographic Marginalization

The scale also captures the intersection of sexual violence with racial and socioeconomic stereotypes (e.g., Item 15: “A rapist is more likely to be Black or Hispanic than White”; Item 17: “Rape mainly occurs on the ‘bad’ side of town”). These items evaluate how dominant social groups externalize criminality onto racial minorities and economically disadvantaged communities, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of sexual assaults are intraracial and occur across all socioeconomic strata.

Theoretical Framework

The Rape Myth Scale is grounded in feminist social theory, social-cognitive psychology, and structural models of intergroup dominance. Several complementary theoretical paradigms underpin its development:

Feminist Critiques of Rape Culture

Originating in the works of Susan Brownmiller (1975) and Martha Burt (1980), feminist theory posits that rape is not an isolated crime of individual psychopathology or uncontrollable sexual passion; rather, it is a structural mechanism of social control that maintains patriarchal power dynamics. Rape myths function as an ideological superstructure that masks systemic gender oppression, sanitizes male dominance, and restricts women’s physical and social mobility through fear.

Social Dominance Theory and System Justification Theory

According to Social Dominance Theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) and System Justification Theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), individuals are motivated to defend, bolster, and justify existing societal hierarchies. In patriarchal social systems, rape myths operate as “hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths”—culturally shared values and beliefs that justify group-based inequality and blame marginalized individuals for the systemic harm they experience.

Ambivalent Sexism Theory

Although developed shortly after the RAM’s inception, Ambivalent Sexism Theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) provides a crucial framework for understanding the RAM’s internal dynamics. Hostile sexism—overtly negative, misogynistic attitudes toward women who challenge traditional roles—correlates strongly with rape myth acceptance. In this framework, rape myths serve as punitive cognitive instruments directed against women who violate traditional sexual scripts, modesty norms, or relational boundaries.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the RAM has been established across multiple validation studies, demonstrating robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity:

Construct and Convergent Validity

In Lonsway and Fitzgerald’s (1995) seminal structural equation modeling study, the RAM demonstrated profound convergent associations with theoretically related constructs:

• Attitudes Toward Women: RAM scores correlated strongly and negatively with egalitarian gender-role beliefs measured by the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; r = -.45 to -.62), confirming that individuals who endorse traditional gender hierarchies are substantially more likely to accept rape myths.
• Hostile and Benevolent Sexism: Subsequent investigations have documented strong positive correlations between the RAM and the Hostile Sexism subscale of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; r values typically exceeding .60).
• Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence (AIV): The RAM demonstrates moderate-to-high correlations with general acceptance of interpersonal violence (r ≈ .52 to .68), illustrating that rape myths are linked to broader behavioral scripts approving of coercive interpersonal dynamics.
• Adversarial Sexual Beliefs (ASB): Moderate-to-high positive associations (r ≈ .55 to .70) demonstrate that the belief that romantic relationships are inherently manipulative directly predicts rape myth endorsement.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by evaluating the RAM against measures of general intelligence, general affective distress, and social desirability scales (such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). The correlations with social desirability are consistently low to modest (typically r = -.12 to -.24), demonstrating that while some degree of impression management exists, the RAM primarily captures genuine attitudinal variance rather than mere compliance with normative survey expectations.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The predictive utility of the RAM has been verified across experimental and forensic contexts:

• Juror Decision-Making: In mock jury simulations, participants scoring high on the RAM systematically assign less credibility to victim testimonies, evaluate the defendant more favorably, recommend lower conviction rates, and impose significantly shorter prison sentences.
• Self-Reported Sexual Aggression: Among male college cohorts, elevated RAM scores consistently predict self-reported past acts of sexual coercion, hypermasculinity, and higher self-reported likelihood of committing sexual assault if guaranteed freedom from prosecution.

Reliability

The Rape Myth Scale exhibits high psychometric reliability across diverse demographic samples:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial validation cohorts conducted by Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1995), Cronbach’s alpha (α) for the overall 19-item scale was reported at .92 among university undergraduate samples. Subsequent investigations utilizing the 19-item measure across collegiate, community, and law enforcement populations have reported alpha coefficients ranging from .88 to .94, well above the .80 benchmark recommended for social science research.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the 19 items generally fall between .42 and .74, indicating that each individual item contributes meaningfully to the shared conceptual variance without excessive redundancy.
• Test-Retest Stability: Over longitudinal testing intervals ranging from two to six weeks, the RAM demonstrates solid temporal stability, with test-retest reliability coefficients reported between r = .82 and r = .89 in non-intervention control conditions, confirming that the scale assesses stable socio-cognitive attitudes rather than transient situational affect.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the RAM was evaluated via rigorous Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) by Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1995):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal axis factoring with oblique rotation yielded a prominent first factor accounting for the majority of the common variance (eigenvalues typically exceeding 6.5), indicating a strong general dimension of rape myth acceptance. Secondary factor extractions revealed identifiable sub-clusters representing specific content domains:

• Victim Blaming and Complicity (Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11)
• Perpetrator Exoneration / Impulse Uncontrollability (Items 5, 13, 14)
• Disbelief / Fabrication / Minimization (Items 6, 7, 12, 16, 18)
• Physical Trauma / Real Rape Heuristics (Items 8, 9)
• Intersectionality / Sociodemographic Marginalization (Items 15, 17)
• Spousal Entitlement (Item 19)

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

CFA models have tested both a strict unidimensional model and a hierarchical second-order model where the overarching construct of RMA accounts for the covariance among first-order sub-dimensions. While the unidimensional model yields acceptable fit indices in broad research contexts (CFI ≈ .91, RMSEA ≈ .065), hierarchical and multidimensional models demonstrate superior fit parameters (CFI > .94, TLI > .93, RMSEA < .052, SRMR < .048). Nevertheless, because of the high inter-factor correlations (typically ranging from .50 to .75 among sub-facets), Lonsway and Fitzgerald recommended that researchers primarily compute and report the unidimensional composite score for maximum psychometric robustness and parsimony.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Rape Myth Scale (RAM) are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Rape Myth Scale (RAM)
• Authors: Kimberly A. Lonsway, Ph.D., and Louise F. Fitzgerald, Ph.D. (1994, 1995)
• Construct Assessed: Rape Myth Acceptance (attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes justifying or denying sexual assault)
• Number of Items: 19 self-report statements
• Response Scale: Standard 7-point Likert scale (or alternate 5-point format in abbreviated surveys):
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedures:
  • All 19 items are keyed in the positive direction; higher raw ratings indicate greater endorsement of rape myths.
  • There are no reverse-scored items in the authentic 19-item version.
  • Total Score: Calculated by summing all 19 item scores (ranging from 19 to 133 on a 7-point scale).
  • Mean Score: Calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across all completed items (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0), which facilitates direct comparison across studies regardless of whether a 5-point or 7-point format was utilized.
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes.
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 16 and older; widely employed across undergraduate student populations, community samples, legal practitioners, and law enforcement cohorts.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Rape Myth Scale (RAM) was developed between 1994 and 1995 as an academic research instrument. The foundational conceptual paper was published in Psychology of Women Quarterly (1994), followed by its empirical psychometric validation in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1995). The instrument was subsequently compiled in Michael Flood’s reference compendium, Measures for the Assessment of Dimensions of Violence Against Women (2008), hosted by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI).

Licensing and Usage: The RAM is in the public domain for non-commercial academic, clinical, educational, and scientific research purposes. No royalty fees or formal institutional permissions are required to administer the scale in empirical investigations, provided proper bibliographic attribution is given to Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1994, 1995). Commercial adaptation, redistribution within proprietary software suites, or integration into fee-based assessment tools requires prior written authorization from the copyright holders and the American Psychological Association (APA).

References

Below are primary academic works and foundational sources documenting the development, theoretical grounding, and psychometric validation of the Rape Myth Scale:

• 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
• Flood, M. (2008). Measures for the assessment of dimensions of violence against women: A compendium. Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse & Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), pp. 27–28. https://www.svri.org/
• Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 491–512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.491
• Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false-consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01008.x
• 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
• Lonsway, K. A., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1995). Attitudinal antecedents of rape myth acceptance: A theoretical and empirical reexamination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(4), 704–711. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.4.704
• Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139175043

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)