Victim Blaming and the Swedish Consent Law - A Swedish vignette experiment investigating the effectiveness of the Law of Consent on normative attitudes towards victim blaming

Abstract

and economical burdens on the victim, especially when the victim is a woman. This study contributes to an expanding literature on social norms, the law, and economics, focusing on the expressive effect of the law as one of the main channels that can shape societal norms. An online vignette survey was conducted, randomly allocating respondents to either a treatment or control group, whereby one group received information about the Swedish law of consent and the other did not, respectively. This was conducted in a Swedish context using students from a variety of educational institutions in V¨astra G¨otaland’s county (N=1,410). This study has found that being informed of the law did not have any statistical significance on reducing victim blame compared to not being informed. Nevertheless, we find strong evidence that women place less victim blame than men.