Assessing Weight Stigma in Mock Jurors when Female Child Victims Testify Against Sexual Assault in Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the psycho-legal literature, some studies have found that the body weight of female victims of sexual assault influence mock jurors’ perceptions of the victim and the testimony. The research is limited to adult victims of sexual assault and does not represent the context of the Canadian judicial system. This study investigated mock juror weight and legal-based perceptions after reviewing a vignette that was based on a legal case from the Supreme Court of Canada involving a 14-year-old female child testifying for sexual assault. A hundred and eighty-five participants acted as mock jurors and were randomly assigned to one of three artist court room sketches depicting child female victims of different body weights (underweight, average, or obese). Self- report questionnaires were completed to assess negative and positive weight-based perceptions of the child victim, general positive and negative perceptions toward the child victim, verdict decisions, and legal perceptions of the child and the accused. The current findings suggested that neither specific negative (i.e., lazy, undisciplined, self-indulgent) nor positive (i.e., friendly, outgoing, productive) weight-based perceptions or general positive (i.e., sympathy toward the complainant) or negative (i.e., anger toward the complainant) perceptions were significantly influenced by the child victim’s body weight. Nevertheless, male mock jurors indicated higher negative weight-based perceptions compared to female mock jurors. All other tested demographics of mock jurors (i.e., race, caregiver status) were not associated with weight-based perceptions. The weight of the female child victim also did not significantly influence mock jurors' legal verdict decision making. Lastly, the female child victims' body weight did not significantly influence mock jurors' legal perceptions (i.e., believability of the complainant, believability of the accused, or controllability of the complainant's behaviour). These results suggest that a female child sexual assault victim’s body weight may not significantly influence jurors' perceptions or legal decision making. Potential implications of the current study's findings are discussed concerning the Canadian judicial system, legal professionals, mental health professionals, and the field of counselling psychology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".