Dr. Dean Fido

So when we think of psychopathy, we instantly go to murderers, serial killers, your Ted Bundys.

But when we refer to psychopathic traits, what we're looking at is how individuals can be callous.

They might lack empathy.

They might be really manipulative.

They might be sadistic in nature.

They might have quite high narcissistic personality traits.

And it's the amalgamation of these traits which spur people to behave both physically and, as we've shown in online spaces, in sexually deviant manners.

Yeah, so we developed a vignette, which is a scenario-based examination whereby we had individuals at a spa setting.

So to get around that gendered term of wearing a skirt, we had the individuals in spa robes, and we asked our participants to imagine what these individuals would be like lying,

in a spa setting, and they had the ability almost to look up their dressing gowns and take images should they wish.

This was all kind of a metaphorical perspective.

And what we found is that individuals who were male victims, our participants felt that there was a lot less harm, a lot more blame, and certainly a lot less criminality associated with these individuals being victims.

Oh, of course.

And that's exactly what lots of our researchers argued.

And we see a similar pattern regardless of whether it's quote unquote revenge pornography or deep fake sexual abuse.

We see that males who are victimized have a lot less impact associated with them.

This has implications for how victims can seek help across barriers, how they deal with police, how they deal with courtroom settings.

And within those courtroom settings, how the general public can perceive them as victims should it go to trial.

So that question came out of this difficulty in terms of getting people to admit whether they have or have not engaged in such behaviors in the past.

And because this was only just made illegal at the time of data collection, we didn't have any actual forensic populations, any people within prison settings to do these examinations on.