Note: This post started out as a fairly light-hearted entry on the myriad assumptions we make about other people's body hair, but the more I thought about it the more I started wondering if there might be an appearance-based "absolve the accused" reflex similar to the better known "blame the victim" one.

According to the NCBI ROFL curators at Discoblogs

Mock jurors’ perceptions of facial hair on criminal offenders.

“Two studies were conducted to measure whether mock jurors would stereotype criminal offenders as having facial hair. In Study 1, participants were asked which photograph belonged to a defendant in a rape case and which photograph belonged to a plaintiff in a head-injury case after they were “accidentally” dropped. The photographs were similar in appearance except one had facial hair. 78% of 63 participants (or 49) identified the photograph with facial hair as being involved in the rape case. In Study 2, 371 participants were asked to sketch the face of a criminal offender. 82% of the sketches (or 249) contained some form of facial hair. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that criminal defendants are perceived as having facial hair.”

Source: Discover Blogs

I know I keep bringing up stuff like this but the anthropology of body and facial hair is totally fascinating. We just have so many assumptions, prohibitions, mandates, biases, fetishes, and stereotypes related to class, race, religion, sexuality, and, evidently, criminality. All of which, of course, vary from country to country and sometimes year to year.

To be honest, though, this one surprised me. Poorly-shaven faces have been a stock icon for criminality in America for decades, of course, and that in turn has derived from ethnic and class stereotypes. E.g. "the poor" have always been assumed to look shabby and to be criminal; 19th Century WASPs believed Mediterranean immigrants had a propensity for five o'clock shadows and criminal violence; 20th Century America was deeply suspicious of communists, beatniks, and hippies, all of whom were believed to have beards and, once again, to be inclined towards both crime and violence; and here in the 21st Century pop-culture America seems to associate beards with both Islamic and American-loonie violence. So that's not the surprising part.

What is surprising about the study's results, at least to me, is that bearded men would be associated not just with crime in general, or even violent crime in general but violent sexual crime.  (Remember, the research subjects were asked to guess which violent crimes were committed based on photos of men they believed had all been accused of crimes of violence.

Meanwhile if you look at the demographics of the people who really are most likely to commit rape they have a decided tendency to blend in very smoothly with the rest of the male population.

Hmm... You know, as always, that studies, and especially small-scale ones, are best taken with grains of salt at least until corroborated with further, more substantial studies.  But to the extent this study suggests implicit but substantially incorrect assumptions about rapists I wonder if there there might be a social "perpetrator absolving" reflex very similar to the "she must have asked for it somehow" victim-blaming reflex where not only are victims judged on their superficial appearance but so are the accused.

It's not at all cool to assume that a victim "deserved" sexual assault based on something she wore.  It would be equally uncool if it turned out that similar assumptions were made based on the appearance of the accused.

Might be a good question to ask Constable Michael Sanguinetti