Most individuals who experience rape do not call it “rape”; rather, they use other terms like “miscommunication”, “bad sex”, or “sexual assault”. When individuals use terms other than rape this is termed lack of rape acknowledgment or unacknowledgment. Unacknowledgment is associated with risk for repeated victimization. In Study 1, N = 439, participants were randomly assigned to a dichotomous (yes/no) or Likert response format for the rape acknowledgment item. Participants who choose non-polar, Likert responses such as “probably raped” reported less stereotypical rape experiences such as anal rape (X2 > 8.18, p <.008). In Study 2, 293 participants completed both rape and sexual assault acknowledgment items in a randomized order. Participants were 1.43 – 2.63x more likely to acknowledge sexual assault “I was sexually assaulted” than rape for victimization and 2.35 – 5.23x more likely to acknowledge sexual assault for their own perpetration behavior. Our findings suggest that using a Likert scale to measure acknowledgment may better identify those at-risk. Similarly, measuring sexual assault acknowledgment increases the number of cases identified. This may be especially helpful for identify those at risk of perpetration, as using the term sexual assault resulted in acknowledgment rates 3-8x higher than prior research.
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Anderson et al. (2022) studied this question.