Implicit Biases and Empathy for Rape Victims: Neural and Behavioural Responses to Facial Cues

Society's empathic response to a rape victim plays a crucial role in her physical and psychological recovery. However, these responses are often hindered by biases shaped by sociocultural norms and gender stereotypes. Such biases may arise from judgements about a woman's clothing, appearance, place of residence or occupation. This study examines a subtle yet impactful form of discriminatory bias formed from facial images of presumed rape victims. The visual characteristics of the female faces were systematically manipulated to represent (a) cultural or traditional prototypical signature ("Bindi" or dot on the forehead and hair tied back) versus atypical features (no dot on the forehead and hair cut short and left loose), (b) varying skin tones (light to dark) and (c) place of residence. In this first-of-its-kind functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging experiment, data from 20 male participants were collected and analysed. The results indicate that faces with traditional or prototypical features and darker skin tones elicited greater activation in neural regions associated with empathy compared to atypical faces, whereas place of residence showed no significant effect. Furthermore, scores on the Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA) Questionnaire indicated an overall rejection of rape myths, as expected given the participants' educational background, although two subscales revealed a tendency to extend the benefit of doubt to the perpetrator and to attribute greater blame to the victim. Although neural activations within empathy-related networks and self-report measures of RMA, target empathy, and trait empathy did not reach statistical significance, the observed trends mirror real-world societal responses to rape victims. Despite being preliminary, these findings provide important evidence for the influence of implicit, normalised biases in shaping empathic responses.