Most of the time the community has no other form of experience with crime besides what they have been taught through the rape acceptance myths. When this happens, the victim is reluctant to share the incident with law enforcement. The victims do not want to be re-victimized by officers being judgmental, or by justifying the rape. People will sometimes come up with ways to justify the rape by giving pardon to the offender. If the community wants to move on from placing stigma on the victims, the citizens have to be aware of the actions they are performing. In order to protect the victim during a sexual assault case people have to stop justifying the action of the incident with rape myth acceptance. Rape acceptance myths are wrongfully influencing members of the community allowing the victim to be re-victimized, the victim might face rape myth acceptance from their support groups while there is victimization occurring in the group as a result of the rape, and the police can also be affected by rape myths affecting the support they give the …show more content…
The community will focus on what the victim did wrong therefore blaming the victim for being attacked. There are different types of myths that people will believe. One of the most common is the myth about “real rape” (Radacic, 2014). “Real rape” can only occur when the crime was “a violent attack by a stranger in an outdoor setting on an unsuspecting victim which she physically resists” (Radacic, 2014). With this ideology most rape victims would not have a “real rape” case. This myth has a few false. One, the victim can only be raped by a stranger in an outdoor setting. This would be excluding rapes committed by intimate partners or in the persons home. Over half of rapes committed occur in the victim’s house or in a friend’s house (Planty, Langton, Krebs, Berzofsky, & Smiley-McDonald, 2016). According to the myth, most rapes that occur would not be real. Only about 15% of the rapes occur in an open outdoor space (Planty et al., 2016). Rapes do occur in both of those instances. Another false is that the victim can only happen if the victim is a female. There are many males who are raped, but those cases do not have much attention because society is embarrassed that a male would be raped. This ideology can be attributive to gender theories. Gender theories place more