A new survey shows Americans showing less support for survivors of sexual violence a year after #MeToo began - but experts say the reality is more complicated

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A new survey shows Americans showing less support for survivors of sexual violence a year after #MeToo began - but experts say the reality is more complicated

FILE PHOTO:    Caitlyn MacGregor, with

Thomson Reuters

Caitlyn MacGregor, with "#metoo" written on her face and wearing a pink "pussyhat", attends the second annual Women's March in Cambridge

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  • A new poll from YouGov and The Economist shows Americans, particularly Trump voters and women, showing less support for survivors of sexual violence a year after the #MeToo movement took root.
  • Nicole Bedera, a sociologist who specializes in gender and sexual violence, told Business Insider that the reality is more complicated than one survey can capture-especially without polling before #MeToo.
  • Bedera also pointed out that party identification is a far more powerful indicator of support for sexual misconduct survivors than gender.

The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have brought down dozens of powerful men and sparked a nationwide reckoning over issues of sexual harassment and violence, but a new YouGov/The Economist poll shows Americans are far less inclined to support survivors than they were one year ago.

YouGov polled 1,500 Americans on the same questions surrounding sexual misconduct in early November 2017, just a few weeks after The New York Times and the New Yorker reported on the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and in the last week of September 2018.

From 2017 to 2018, the percentage of adults agreeing that false rape allegations were a bigger problem than sexual assault rose from 13% to 18% - and from 20% to 35% among people who said they voted for President Donald Trump.

While the percentage of adults agreeing with the statement "women who complain about sexual harassment cause more problems than they solve" changed by just a few points, the number of Trump voters agreeing jumped by 10 percentage points. The number of women agreeing increased by 4%, while the percentage of men agreeing remained more or less the same.

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The starkest difference in opinion were the responses to the statement "men who sexually harassed women 20 years ago should not lose their jobs today," to which 28% responded yes in 2017 and 36% in 2018. The number of women agreeing increased by 7%, and the percentage of Trump voters saying so jumped by 20 points.

Nicole Bedera, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan whose research focuses on sexual violence, cautioned against drawing broad conclusions from the survey alone due to the timing of the surveys and phrasing of some of the questions.

In an email to Business Insider, Bedera said that because 2017 results were conducted a few weeks after the #MeToo hashtag first took root on Twitter, they weren't enough of a baseline result to accurately show how people would respond to the same questions before #MeToo.

This means while support may have decreased compared to last year, it still may be much higher on net than before the movement started and dozens of men were toppled by sexual misconduct allegations.

Bedera also argued that the results may be skewed by the complicated phrasing of some questions, making them difficult to answer, particularly the question on women reporting harassment "causing more problems than they solve."

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"Most organizations are very ill-equipped to deal with sexual harassment in any meaningful way," she said.

"The result is that even people who support survivors of sexual assault would have a hard time seeing survivors as solving any problems by coming forward... but that isn't so much a failing of survivors as the systems they report to," she added.

Party identification is often more predictive of a person's opinion than gender

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Demonstrators in New York protest against the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh

Bedera said that overall, "the survey captures the difficulty of holding a perpetrator of sexual assault or harassment accountable, particularly when that perpetrator is someone we might otherwise care about or hope will succeed."

She added that the partisan divides in the results show the "dangers of politicizing sexual misconduct: that when the person accused is someone on our side, we will be quick to look the other way - or even actively defend them."

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The Economist noted in its analysis of the data that the average size of the shifts away from believing survivors were larger among women than men, but both they and Bedera pointed out that party identity is usually far more predictive of a given person's views of sexual misconduct - or any issue - than their gender.

"Women are not a homogeneous group," Bedera explained. "White women in particular are divided on issues like sexual violence, largely along party lines. There is also a substantial political divide between single and married white women."

This broad phenomenon is reflected in the survey data, with the gap between Trump and Clinton voters six times larger than the gaps in opinion between men and women for three of the questions.

"To understand why women are showing greater support for men accused of sexual assault or harassment, it's important to note which women are expressing those values," Bedera continued. "For example, mothers of college men accused of sexual assault often come to the defense of their sons, regardless of the credibility of the claims against them."

These divides were also reflected in the public opinion polling on embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who became a particularly polarizing nominee when two women accused him of sexually assaulting them in the early 1980s.

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While the gender gap on support for his confirmation averaged about 18 points the day before his confirmation, the divide in support for Kavanaugh was a stunning 100 points, around -75 points among Democrats, but +75 among Republicans, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

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