Dear rePro-Truth Community,
Our next deep dive, which is set for publication on Monday morning, discusses objectification via Violability. Below, is a preview of a portion of Monday’s article.
Enjoy!
S. P. Rogers
When a group of people is objectified, as history attests, this objectification results in increased rates of violence and abuse against members of the objectified group — sometimes of the most horrifying kind.123
Objectification is the seeing and treating of someone as an object.4 As such, objectification is “a particular form of dehumanization.”5 Thus, objectification not only reduces a person to a thing, it also strips away a person's humanity.6
Women, girls (including prepubescent girls), and pregnant people are especially vulnerable to being perceived and treated as things.78
Because objectification is form of dehumanization, it reduces human beings to mere things that exist “for others’ use or benefit”9 and strips them of their humanity.10 ── And “when people are no longer thought of as fully human, they are no longer treated with the respect that such humanity warrants… This results in an increase in the physical violence they experience.”11
Violability
The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into
Research shows that the objectification of women and girls “can elicit aggression toward them, even in the absence of a provocation.”12 Furthermore, research shows that objectification is connected to “downplaying concerns about consent”13 and treating pregnant people “as public property (e.g., ogling and touching without their permission while ignoring consent)”;14 and that objectified persons “are perceived as less deserving of moral treatment and more deserving of pain, that is, as more violable.”15
In other words, objectifying persons “facilitates violating them.”16
Dr. David N. Hackney is a Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist (MFM), otherwise known as a high-risk pregnancy OB-GYN. In the second chapter of his recently published book, Impossible Choices: A Physician's Guidance on High-Risk Pregnancy in a World Without Roe (which rePro-Truth highly recommends), Dr. Hackney discusses a subject so heart-rending and so tragic that many people prefer to not even think of it: childhood pregnancy.
Visualize for a painful moment a ten-year-old at a full forty weeks gestation, struggling to stand from a chair or walk down a hall pulled under the weight of a term uterus: an image not only heartbreaking but clearly dangerous.17
According to FBI crime data, “51% of reported rapes are perpetrated against people ages 0-19.”18 ── “That’s approximately 61,754 young rape victims every year, including our most vulnerable children, adolescents navigating middle and high school, and young adults just beginning to move through the world.”19 According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), “41% of the kids who survive child sexual abuse are ages 0-11. The youngest are infants; the oldest is in 5th or 6th grade.”20 Data from KIDS COUNT Data Center shows that there were approximately 1,730 live births by children under the age of 15 in 2024.
Sexual assault and abuse “may be the most obvious illustrations[] of violability; the perpetrator physically penetrates the other’s body.”21 This violation is intensified when it results in pregnancy, especially when the victim is a child. As Dr. Hackney notes in his book, “Carrying a pregnancy in a small ten-year-old body risks injury for obvious reasons of physical size.”22
Making matters worse, the rapist is not alone in objectifying his victim. The objectification of women, girls, and pregnant people saturates our culture and percolates through all levels of society, from the President to the frat house to the police station, with harmful effects. Studies show that “objectification increases dehumanization and victim blame and reduces perceptions of perpetrator responsibility in cases of stranger and acquaintance rape.”23
The rapist tells his victim, with brutal efficiency, that she is violable: that he can use her body for whatever he wants and abuse her body whenever he wants; that her body is not hers; and that what she wants simply does not matter. — Society denies her pain and tells her she deserved it.
Meghan M. Boone & Benjamin J. McMichael, Reproductive Objectification, 108 MINN. L. REV. 2493 (2024). Available at: https://doi.org/10.24926/265535.4286
DOROTHY ROBERTS, KILLING THE BLACK BODY 310 (2d ed. 2017) (“The social justice approach to liberty recognizes the connection between the dehumanization of the individual and the subordination of the group.”).
Kinga Lachowicz-Tabaczek, Monika A. Kozłowska, Jolanta Babiak, The interpersonal objectification scale: A new measure of the dispositional tendency to treat other people as instrumental objects, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 257, 2026, 113770, ISSN 0191-8869, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113770. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886926001340)
Nussbaum M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249–291. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1995.tb00032.x
Gervais, S. J., Checkalski, O., Moradi, B., Dyer, R., & Brock, R. L. (2026). The Pregnancy-Related Objectification Beliefs Scale (PROBS): Development and Validation of a Measure of Reproductive Objectification of Pregnant Women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261475294
Heflick, N. A., Goldenberg, J. L., Cooper, D. P., & Puvia, E. (2011). From women to objects: Appearance focus, target gender, and perceptions of warmth, morality and competence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(3), 572–581. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.020
Heflick, N. A., Goldenberg, J. L., Cooper, D. P., & Puvia, E. (2011). From women to objects: Appearance focus, target gender, and perceptions of warmth, morality and competence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(3), 572–581. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.020
Meghan M. Boone & Benjamin J. McMichael, Reproductive Objectification, 108 MINN. L. REV. 2493 (2024). Available at: https://doi.org/10.24926/265535.4286
Gervais, S. J., Checkalski, O., Moradi, B., Dyer, R., & Brock, R. L. (2026). The Pregnancy-Related Objectification Beliefs Scale (PROBS): Development and Validation of a Measure of Reproductive Objectification of Pregnant Women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261475294
Heflick, N. A., Goldenberg, J. L., Cooper, D. P., & Puvia, E. (2011). From women to objects: Appearance focus, target gender, and perceptions of warmth, morality and competence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(3), 572–581. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.020
Meghan M. Boone & Benjamin J. McMichael, Reproductive Objectification, 108 MINN. L. REV. 2493 (2024). Available at: https://doi.org/10.24926/265535.4286
Kinga Lachowicz-Tabaczek, Monika A. Kozłowska, Jolanta Babiak, The interpersonal objectification scale: A new measure of the dispositional tendency to treat other people as instrumental objects, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 257, 2026, 113770, ISSN 0191-8869, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113770. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886926001340)
Gervais, S. J., Checkalski, O., Moradi, B., Dyer, R., & Brock, R. L. (2026). The Pregnancy-Related Objectification Beliefs Scale (PROBS): Development and Validation of a Measure of Reproductive Objectification of Pregnant Women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261475294
Gervais, S. J., Checkalski, O., Moradi, B., Dyer, R., & Brock, R. L. (2026). The Pregnancy-Related Objectification Beliefs Scale (PROBS): Development and Validation of a Measure of Reproductive Objectification of Pregnant Women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261475294
LaCrois, J. M., & Pratto, F. (2015). Instrumentality and the denial of personhood: The social psychology of objectifying others | cairn.info. CAIRN.INFO. https://shs.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-psychologie-sociale-2015-1-page-183?lang=fr
LaCrois, J. M., & Pratto, F. (2015). Instrumentality and the denial of personhood: The social psychology of objectifying others | cairn.info. CAIRN.INFO. https://shs.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-psychologie-sociale-2015-1-page-183?lang=fr
Hackney, D. N. (2026). Exception: Who Receives Care and Who Does Not? In Impossible choices: A physician’s guidance on high-risk pregnancy in a world without Roe (Ebook, p. 34). The MIT Press.
Sexual violence statistics - rainn. RAINN. (2026). https://rainn.org/get-informed/sexual-violence-statistics/
Sexual violence statistics - rainn. RAINN. (2026). https://rainn.org/get-informed/sexual-violence-statistics/
Sexual violence statistics - rainn. RAINN. (2026). https://rainn.org/get-informed/sexual-violence-statistics/
LaCrois, J. M., & Pratto, F. (2015). Instrumentality and the denial of personhood: The social psychology of objectifying others | cairn.info. CAIRN.INFO. https://shs.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-psychologie-sociale-2015-1-page-183?lang=fr
Hackney, D. N. (2026). Exception: Who Receives Care and Who Does Not? In Impossible choices: A physician’s guidance on high-risk pregnancy in a world without Roe (Ebook, p. 34). The MIT Press.
Watson, L. B., Gervais, S. J., Moradi, B., Germain, J. M., Graf, T. R., O’Shea, K., & Michl, T. D. (2026). Abortion Stigma and Dehumanization as Reproductive Control: The Roles of Sexual Objectification, Abortion Circumstance, and Sexism. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 50(3), 358-380. https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843261437756