© 2015 Springer Publishing Company 265 http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/0886-6708.VV-D-13-00099 Violence and Victims, Volume 30, Number 2, 2015 Effects of Group Status and Victim Sex on Female Bystanders’ Responses to a Potential Party Rape Jennifer Katz, PhD Samuel Colbert, BA Liane Colangelo, BA SUNY College at Geneseo This research examined bystander responses to 1 of 4 potential party rape scenarios. Undergraduate women (N 5 249) imagined attending a party either alone or with three friends where a sober man led an intoxicated potential victim (either male or female) into a bedroom. After random assignment to conditions, participants reported on intent to help and barriers to helping the potential victim. In contrast to the classic bystander effect, bystanders in groups intended to offer more help than lone bystanders. Bystanders also intended to offer more help to potential female than male victims and experienced more barriers to helping male victims. Two of these barriers (lack of personal responsibility to help and identifying risk) explained the lower intentions to help potential male victims. Potential male victims were more likely than female victims to be perceived as gay, and bystanders reported the least intentions to help presumably gay men at risk. Keywords: sexual assault; party rape; bystander intervention; helping C ollege sexual assault is a prevalent, harmful problem (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000; Lawyer, Resnick, Bakanic, Burkett, & Kilpatrick, 2010). Krebs, Lindquist, Warner, Fisher, and Martin (2007) found that 19% of undergraduate women reported either attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college, with sexual assault defined as oral, vaginal, or anal penetration. About 83% of women who experi- enced completed sexual assault were incapacitated by alcohol or drugs at the time. In the same study, 6.1% of undergraduate men reported attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college, and 90% of men who experienced completed sexual assault were incapacitated by alcohol or drugs. Students who experience incapacitated sexual assault are at risk for anxiety, traumatic stress, self-blame, and post-assault hazardous alcohol use (e.g., Littleton, Grills-Taquechel, & Axsom, 2009). Many alcohol- or drug-related sexual assaults are “party rapes,” a form of sexual assault in which an intoxicated person at a social gathering is targeted for sex (Armstrong, Hamilton, & Sweeney, 2006). The pre-assault phase at social gatherings generally occurs in a fun rather than threatening context (Koelsch, Brown, & Boisen, 2012) in which poten- tial victims may be targeted. Some potential victims may be too incapacitated to provide affirmative sexual consent; in other cases, potential victims may be drugged to create