Past research has found that when victims are ingroup members, observers’ social identification interacts with general belief in a just world (GBJW) to predict judgments about those victims. In this correlational study (N = 284 women, ages from 18 to 80) we aimed to test whether and how women’s explicit endorsement of BJW, both personal belief in a just world (PBJW) and GBJW, interacts with their identification as women to predict wife abuse legitimization.
We predicted and found that the interaction between PBJW and social identification predicted legitimization of wife abuse. Specifically, for highly identified women, PBJW was positively associated with wife abuse legitimization, for less identified women, PBJW was not associated with wife abuse legitimization. This interaction was significant above and beyond other variables associated with this phenomenon: hostile and benevolent sexism, empathy (cognitive and emotional), and social desirability. On the contrary, the interaction between GBJW and social identification was a nonsignificant predictor of legitimization of wife abuse. These results contribute to reconceptualize the role of PBJW and GBJW on judgments about victims and to highlight the importance of considering the victimization situations in the social context and the social groups in which they actually occur.
Wife abuse, defined as physical and/or sexual violence against women by their male partners, is a very common problem around the globe involving severe consequences for victims, their families and society as a whole. For example, studies conducted in ten countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand and the United Republic of Tanzania) estimated that lifetime prevalence rates of physical or/and sexual partner violence varied from 15% to 71% (Garcia-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise, & Watts, 2006). Other studies estimated such rates as varying between 17.4% and 25.5% in the USA (Malley-Morrison & Hines, 2004), and between 10% and 50% in Europe (Machado & Dias, 2008). However shockingly high these figures are, most authors sustain they may be underestimations of the actual rates (Machado, Dias, & Coelho, 2010).
In most Western countries wife abuse is a crime, thus being officially illegitimate. Nevertheless very often wife abuse is given some degree of unofficial legitimation in various social interactions (for a review, see Baker, Cook, & Norris, 2003). For instance, individuals recurrently justify wife abuse by attributing it to the victims’ presumed negative actions or/and their bad character. In fact, the media very often consider abused wives as ultimately responsible for both being in that situation and for putting an end to it (Berns, 1999). Furthermore, these victims may also expect these unsupportive reactions from the formal or informal systems that are supposed to help them, for instance their families, the clergy, the police, the welfare, the shelters, the justice system, the courts, the helping professionals, medical doctors and nurses, and even other women (for a review see Machado, Dias, & Coelho, 2010). Instead, these victims often meet a decrease in (or even to the absence of) social support. Given that social support is crucial for individuals’ physical and psychological well-being in general, this state of affairs is especially deleterious for victims (Cohen & Wills, 1985).
In this paper our goal is to deepen our understanding of how just world and gender identification processes can contribute to explain women’s judgements of wife abuse legitimation.
