Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow Working on Increasing Societal Acknowledgement of Rape

28 October 2024

Dr. Boglarka Nyul, a 2023-25 Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at Tel Aviv University (TAU), first became interested in sexual assault as a topic of research due to a personal story that her friend in her master’s program shared with her.

“I was sitting with my classmates thinking about what our master’s theses should be about, and I mentioned that I might be interested in intimate partner violence,” Nyul recalls. “I had one friend in class then tell me, I was sexually abused by my sister’s boyfriend—I was shocked that someone I knew experienced something like this and I didn’t know.”

Many years later, Nyul has dedicated much of her research to measures that can help society to both more proactively acknowledge occurrences of rape and support victims, and to support sexual assault education at a younger age.

Focus on Societal Blame and Gender-Based Violence

For her PhD, Nyul decided to focus on why society tends to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator, focusing on the country where she is from: Hungary. At the time, there were very few public or academic conversations happening related to sexual assault.

“My PhD was validating measures in Hungary and mapping how situational factors affect how and whether people label something as rape or not—what kind of situational factors are important for victim blaming and perpetrator excusing.”

During a postdoc in Italy, Nyul continued to research gender-based violence, but this time through the framework of intervention. During that time, she worked with an IT company to develop short educational games that could be used in high schools to counter gender-based violence. The games, which utilized social psychological methods, were tested in schools in Slovenia, Italy, Hungary, and Poland.

Developing A Framework for Rape Acknowledgement

At TAU, Nyul is focused on developing and then testing a theoretical framework aimed at better encouraging rape acknowledgement at the societal, governmental and individual levels.

“What we’re trying to do now, is that people don’t always label rape in the same way and that there are different roots,” says Nyul.

“My plan is to begin with the theory, and then to follow with scientific steps tested experimentally, to help let us know what to tackle to increase rape acknowledgement … the idea is to create a framework that could be used in education and policy, and by psychologists and student associations.”

While Nyul acknowledges that the past year has been unlike any she ever expected, she says she is glad for the support she has received both from her postdoctoral supervisor, Prof. Nurit Shnabel, and her fellow researchers, as well as from the Azrieli Foundation, which she said is particularly invested in her success.

“The Azrielis are giving so much more than just a scholarship; they give workshops on leadership, on writing, on how to use new methodologies like AI … they really want to prepare us for a later stage of our career, and they really want to create a community.”

The fellowship offers a monthly stipend of 14,000 ILS; meaning that Nyul doesn’t need to take on additional work during her postdoc and has more time to dedicate to research.

How Brilliance Is Perceived Across Genders

One of the latest fruits this research has borne is a joint publication in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology on how brilliance is perceived across gender categories and the implications of these perceptions. Along with her joint authors—Inna Ksenofontov (University of Osnabrück), Alexandra Fleischmann (University of Cologne), and Rotem Kahalon (Bar-Ilan University)—Nyul interviewed more than 900 people and found that brilliant people are more likely to be described with masculine traits and that men described as brilliant tend to be perceived as more likeable than women who are described as brilliant.

“Essentially, we found that it’s harder to be seen as brilliant for women than for men.”

As for her next steps, she’ll continue to complete her research at TAU until her postdoc ends in October 2025, and she’s looking forward to the next stages of her work.