Development and Validation of the Secondary Victimization Scale

Sexual violence is ubiquitous in the history of human relationships, with the victim being perceived as responsible for their own misfortune. This phenomenon is labelled secondary victimization and is manifested in blaming, minimizing the suffering, and avoiding the victim. This article presents evidence of the validity of a scale that measures individual differences in these three types of secondary victimization of rape victims. In Study 1, we developed the scale items and analyzed their content validity. In Study 2, we carried out an exploratory analysis of its factorial structure and verified the set-up of the items in three theoretically predicted factors (blaming, minimizing the suffering, and avoiding the victim), which had convergent validity with the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale, and discriminant validity with the Big Five Personality Traits, in addition to having concurrent validity with the Belief in a Just World Scale (BJWS). In Study 3, we confirmed this tri-factor structure using confirmatory analysis. In Study 4, we analyzed the predictive validity of the Secondary Victimization Scale (SVS), proposing the hypothesis that secondary victimization mediates the effect of BJWS on the participants' behavior towards a rape victim. The summary of the results shows consistent evidence of the SVS's validity.