The Social Representation of Sexual Violence Between "Background and Surface Attitudes" A Research with University Students

Abstract

The problem of "sexual violence", a central challenge of our society, keeps existing in spite of condamning stances from the institutions and the cultural world. It's a controvertial problem, especially regarding the rapists' specific behaviours and its quantitative consistence. The present paper was made with a sample of university students in order to verify the influence of gender, level and type of studies, and of psychosocial variables on the represantion of the phenomenon. The first results seem to confirm the hypotheses.