Gender differences in Moral judgement of gender violence: a study about intentionality, consequence and social distance

Abstract

In 2018, 1.6 million women were beaten or strangled. A technical note from the Brazilian Public Security Forum in April 2020 reported that, with the adoption of quarantine as a measure to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the number of calls attended by Military Police in response to complaints of domestic violence in São Paulo in March 2020 increased by almost 45%. In view of the alarming numbers and the physical and psychological damage caused by the attacks, a better understanding of the topic is imperative. Understanding morality as the field of regulation of social relations, its study to understand social phenomena such as gender violence is important. Theories maintain that morality is susceptible to cognitive biases and the context in which it is put to the test, so it is possible to understand that moral judgments made about a certain habit contribute to its maintenance or extinction. The objective of the present project is to investigate the historical maintenance of the phenomenon of gender violence from the perspective of the selection of this behavior by a set of individual moral judgments that constitute a permissive culture with such a practice. It is our interest, therefore, to ascertain the influence of factors on such judgments; they are: gender of the person making the judgment, information about the aggressor's intention, information about the consequences of the aggression for the victim and the degree of proximity between the aggressor and the person making the judgment. In addition to these main factors, the influence of other characteristics of those who make the judgment will also be verified, namely: moral identity and level of internalization of gender stereotypes. (AU)