Rethinking sexual violence labels: exploring the impact of ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Universities’ responses to sexual violence have faced scrutiny for their lack of proactiveness and their failure to address campus socio-cultural norms that contribute to rape myth acceptance. The labels victim and survivor play a crucial role in shaping attitudes toward sexual violence, but there is limited research on how university students perceive these labels.Objective: This paper explores sexual violence labels and their role in perpetuating rape culture. Undergraduate university students’ beliefs on using the label survivor instead of victim to describe someone who has experienced sexual violence were examined to consider how these labels create societal discourse on sexual violence.Method: The study draws on qualitative data collected from undergraduate students in Canada and the United States through open-response questions in an interactive textbook. Data were analysed and interpreted using a multi-method approach that combined principles of Critical Discourse Analysis and Feminist Poststructuralism. Direct quotes and word clouds from participants’ responses are used as evidence and to visually display discourse.Results: Findings revealed that participants recognised the negative societal discourses associated with the label victim and supported using survivor to challenge perceptions of sexual violence. Despite this, participants expressed hesitancy to adopt the label survivor because of the potential negative implications, such as the label promoting the allocation of individual blame, increasing barriers to justice, and reducing the perceived severity of sexual violence.Conclusions: This study underscores the complexities of sexual violence labels, the influence of language in shaping societal perceptions, and the need for a more comprehensive and equitable approach to responding to sexual violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".