On the observer side, strong predictors are participant's gender, with male participants blaming the victim more, acceptance of rape myths, and sexist attitudes. For instance, observers tend to perceive an incident as rape and blame the victim less if the victim showed some resistance, but blame the victim more in the case of an acquaintance rape than a stranger rape. Independent variables that were addressed include characteristics of victims, perpetrators, and observers as well as situational variables. Research in this area, mostly quantitative studies presenting rape vignettes with varying content, has looked at several dependent variables, including social perceptions of perpetrators and victims, judgments of severity and guilt, and attributions of blame. Perceptions of sexual aggression include various aspects and are influenced by a host of factors. Results are discussed in terms of their applied relevance for communicating about sexual violence. As in Study 2, German-language participants showed no significant effects of the label on their case judgments but rejected the term "survivor" as inappropriate English-language participants, by contrast, perceived the woman describing herself as "survivor" to be more psychologically stable and regarded the use of both labels as appropriate. In Study 3 ( N = 190), participants read a text in which a woman who had been raped labeled herself as either "victim" or "survivor", focusing on the coping with sexual violence. Participants in both language samples judged "survivor" to be a less appropriate term than "victim". Significant interaction effects of label and participants’ gender emerged on case-related judgments. In Study 2 ( N = 95), labels were varied within items assessing judgments of an acquaintance-rape case (e.g., "Does the victim … carry a certain responsibility for what happened? "), focusing on short-term outcomes. Independent of language and participant gender, "survivor" was perceived more positively overall (e.g., as strong, brave, active) than was "victim" ( weak, passive, but also innocent). In Study 1 ( N = 179), participants read a rape vignette and then rated the meaning of the label it contained (either "victim" or "survivor") on a 15-item semantic differential. Three experiments (total N = 464) were conducted in parallel with English- and German-speaking participants to examine the perceived meanings and effects of the labels "victim" versus "survivor" (and their German equivalents) when applied to a woman who was raped.
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