My research on sexual assault is on how third-party observers view the rapist, survivor and the situation. Students are more interested -- and understand better -- areas about sexual assault which I don't study: survivor reactions, and pornography and rape. It makes sense for a psychologist to study how women (and men) respond to sexual assault, how they cope and how to speed the coping process; and it also makes sense for a psychologist to study the relationship between pornography and sexual assault. To students, it seems trivial to study how much a person blames a rapist for raping and what factors make people blame a rape survivor more for being raped. None of these things seem useful.
In this article, from Slate, there's an excellent example about why I study rape the way I do. People don't view rape the same way as other crimes (an excellent set of examples is at the end of the first page and beginning of the second). And, as this whole case shows, the way third-party observers view rape can have a great deal of impact on the well-being of people.
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