Support for Capital Punishment for Rape Offenders as a Collective Retaliation against Honor Threat
Exploring the implications of benevolent and hostile sexism separately in social practice and their relationships with related issues such as rape myths is essential for understanding gender violence which serves to maintain structural gender inequalities, such as retaliatory acts in honor cultures. Although a vast majority of research focused on direct and interpersonal aggressive response or retaliatory acts against the honor threat in honor cultures, little is known about subtler collective social processes in honor-damaging situations. To address the gap in our understanding of how retaliatory responses are carried out against honor threat in a subtler and collective way, we focused on the rising demands for reinstatement of the death penalty to stopped the increased rates of sexual violence in Turkey as a collective retaliatory response against honor-threat. To test this argument, we conducted a survey study with 450 participants to examine the role of ambivalent sexism, the gendered norms of honor culture, and rape myths on the support for death penalty for rape offenders in Turkey. The results indicate that ambivalent sexism and honor culture’s gendered norms predicted support for capital punishment. Furthermore, hostile sexism moderated the relationship between rape myth acceptance and support for death penalty. We find that individuals who have high hostile sexism and strong rape myth acceptance do not support capital punishment. These findings contribute to our understanding of the social mechanisms related to hostile and benevolent sexism which results in support for the death penalty in Turkey.