Rape myths in practice: the everyday work of accounting for rape survivors

The paper addresses persistently low reporting and conviction rates for rape in England and Wales and examines the role of rape myths in shaping responses to survivors. Prior work documents common rape myths that blame survivors, cast doubt on allegations, excuse perpetrators, or limit rape to certain social groups, and shows their effects across the criminal justice system and professional settings. The study asks how rape myths operate in practice within conversations among sexual health staff who support rape survivors. Using a "ground-up" approach grounded in Conversation Analysis, the authors seek to identify when and how mythologising intrudes upon clinical talk, to understand tensions between professional non-blaming norms and lay repertoires, and to inform training to better support survivors while mitigating secondary victimisation and clinician compassion fatigue.

The literature identifies rape myths as widely held false beliefs that deny or justify male sexual aggression (Burt, 1980; Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994), organized into categories that blame survivors, cast doubt, excuse perpetrators, or stereotype contexts (Bohner et al., 2009; Smith & Skinner, 2017). Interpretative repertoires include victim-precipitation (women provoking male sexuality), socio-structural (rape on a continuum of sexual oppression), and miscommunication (consent misread due to norms or intoxication) (Crawford, 1995; Gavey, 2005; Kitzinger & Frith, 1999; O'Byrne et al., 2008). Empirical work shows both young women and men understand nuanced refusals, challenging miscommunication accounts. Rape myths contribute to rape-supportive culture, shape responses to survivors and perpetrators, and are evident in policing and courtroom practices, with consequences including secondary victimisation (Suarez & Gadalla, 2010; HM Government, 2021). Among professionals, greater experience can correlate with higher myth acceptance (McKay, 2001; Fávero et al., 2020), potentially due to compassion fatigue or avoidance of traumatic content (Suarez & Gadalla, 2010; Fox & Carey, 1999). Functional theories suggest a tendency to assign blame when events violate expectations (Anderson, 1996). The authors position their study as a close analysis of situated talk to complement top-down categorizations of rape myths.

Design: A Conversation Analysis (CA) study of a single 90-minute focus group involving five women sexual health clinic staff (three health advisors, one clinic administrator, and a clinical psychologist). The focus group was engineered to elicit personal reactions and professional reflections on three written case summaries of rape seen in the clinic: (a) drug-facilitated rape of a woman by a male stranger, (b) ongoing anal rape within a relationship, and (c) a teenage girl raped by a man met in a park. The facilitator (author Catherine Butler, also a clinic clinician; coded as E in transcripts) posed an opening question for each case: "As we hear these stories, what do they evoke in us, how do they make us feel, and what are our first reactions to them?" Procedure: Staff were emailed information and opted in. The discussion was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim; selected excerpts were further transcribed using CA conventions to capture turn-taking, overlaps, pauses, prosody, and emphasis. Episodes were chosen that highlighted recurrent themes, tensions between professional and lay accounts, and divergences from existing literature. The conversation was intentionally a "breach" of usual clinical routines to surface personal-professional tensions; the facilitator’s insider status met ethnomethodology’s unique adequacy requirement. Analysis: Researchers produced detailed, situated descriptions of selected excerpts and related them to rape myth literature and clinical standards. CA was used to explicate the interactional work whereby participants assessed relatability, reconstructed events diagnostically, and oriented to justice/apportioning blame. The analysis emphasized how salient medical facts and conversational sequencing shaped mythologising or empathy, and how professional remits constrained justice-oriented talk.

• Three recurrent conversational forms were identified:
  1. Assessing relatability: Clinicians contrasted themselves with survivors (often via age), engaging in category work that othered "young people" and imported moral judgments (e.g., casual sex). This blurred personal and professional talk and opened space for rape myths about risky behaviors. In another case, emphasizing relationship status (partner rape) fostered empathy, shifted focus toward the perpetrator’s actions, and reduced myth usage, suggesting some case framings enable more empathetic orientations than others.
  2. Diagnostically reconstructing events: Clinicians explored survivor qualities (e.g., "streetwise-ness," attractiveness) or conditions (ME/CFS) as possible contributing factors, often before centering perpetrator actions. In one case, ME was discussed at length despite being known not to be a factor; in another, the known drug-rape element emerged late and coexisted with talk of “unwise decisions.” Late placement of salient medical facts allowed survivor-focused (myth-prone) narratives to develop upfront.
  3. Justice and apportioning blame: Opening talk of justice/punishment required marked conversational labor and was largely avoided as outside the clinical remit and emotionally difficult. Clinicians emphasized offering belief to survivors as a realistic and valuable alternative or form of justice within clinical roles.
• Across themes, conversations exhibited tensions between lay/moral repertoires and professional non-blaming norms. Empathy could mitigate mythologising depending on how the case was framed (e.g., partner context). Survivor-focused talk did not always equal mythologising, but bordered on just-world reasoning that can imply preventability and blame.

The analyses show clinicians drawing variably on rape myth repertoires (victim-precipitation, miscommunication, socio-structural) while also engaging in moves that both distance from and identify with survivors. This duality aligns with secondary trauma dynamics: distancing (othering, just-world reasoning) can protect clinicians from overwhelm but risks victim-blaming; identification fosters empathy but can threaten clinicians’ wellbeing. The talk frequently prioritized survivor actions and hypothetical preventability, reflecting just-world beliefs with known links to increased survivor blame, especially in stranger-rape contexts. Justice-focused talk was difficult, reinforcing that clinical roles prioritize belief and support rather than legal outcomes. Training should help clinicians detect points where compassion fatigue and just-world reasoning seep into talk, bolster empathetic "hooks" beyond age-based categories, and frontload salient medical facts to constrain myth-prone narratives. Conversation-analytic insights can inform reflective practice, supervision, and training across professions (healthcare, police, legal) where myth repertoires have been documented.

By engineering a reflective conversation and analyzing it with CA, the study foregrounded routine tensions in clinicians’ work with rape survivors: balancing empathy with professional distance, survivor-focused accounting with avoiding mythologising, and clinical support with the exclusion of justice considerations. The authors show that clinicians deploy strategies (e.g., offering belief) that are beneficial yet may at times verge on myths as self-protective measures. The contribution is not a prescriptive language fix, but a transparent description of interactional processes that can guide training and professional development to navigate empathy–distance tradeoffs, prioritize salient facts, and reduce the conditions under which rape myths can flourish. Future research should continue context-sensitive CA to illuminate how talk accomplishes support without reproducing harmful repertoires, and explore the impact of these conversational dynamics on survivors’ experiences and outcomes.

The conversation was intentionally engineered rather than naturally occurring, which may shape topic emergence and participants’ orientations. The single focus group (five women from one clinic) limits generalizability. Conversation Analysis emphasizes local interaction and does not yield generalized prescriptive rules; the approach may not capture the full ‘felt’ experience underlying clinicians’ framing choices. The impact of clinicians’ myth-adjacent strategies on survivors was not directly assessed and remains unknown. Salient case facts were sometimes introduced late in sequences, making it difficult to disentangle methodological from conversational effects.