Sexual coercion - a summary of chapter 15 of Understanding human sexuality by Hyde and DeLamater

Sexology
Chapter 15
Sexual coercion

Rape

Rape: non-consenting oral, anal, or vaginal penetration obtained by force, by threat of force, or when the victim is incapable of giving consent.

Most statistics find that a woman’s lifetime risk of being raped is between 18 and 25 percent.

The impact of rape

Women who experience rape are more likely to show several types of psychological distress

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Suicide ideation and attempts
• Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  Long-term psychological distress suffered by someone who has experienced a trauma.

People who have experienced a terrifying event form a memory schema that involves information about the situation and their responses to it.
Because the schema is large, many cues can trigger it and thereby evoke the feelings of terror that occurred at the time.
The schema is probably activated at some level all the time.
The consequences can be far reaching and long lasting.

Most women who experience a sexual assault have negative psychological reactions immediately afterwards.
Many show significant recovery within a year.
A number of factors are associated with worse psychological outcomes

• Whether the woman has experienced sexual violence previously
• The severity of the violence
• Reactions of others when the woman discloses the assault

Psychotherapeutic treatments for PTSD are available and they are successful in treating rape survivors.

Some women experience self-blame.
Self-blame is linked to worse long-term psychological outcomes.

Damage to women’s physical health that may result from rape

• Physical injuries
• Vaginal pain
• Women who have been forced to have oral sex may suffer irritation or damage to the throat
• Women who were forced to have anal intercourse may have rectal bleeding and pain
• Sexually transmitted infections
• Pregnancy

Rape affects many people besides the victim.
Most women routinely do a number of things that stem from rape fears.
Most women experience the fear of rape, if not rape itself, and this fear restricts their activities.

Spouses or partners of victims may be profoundly affected.
At the same time, they can provide important support.

Not everyone who experiences a serious traumatic event develops PTSD.
Posttraumatic growth: positive life changes and psychological development following exposure to trauma.

Date rape

Date rape is one of the most common forms of rape, especially on college campuses.
In some cases, date rape seems to result from male-female miscommunication.

• Men in general tend to misperceive women’s warmth and friendliness as indicating sexual interest
• Sexually aggressive men are likely to have a ‘suspicious schema’, meaning that they generally believe that women do not communicate honestly, particularly when the woman communicates clearly and assertively that she is rejecting an advance.

Marital rape

Marital rape: the rape of a person by her or his current or former spouse.
The trauma of marital rape is not less severe than in other forms of rape.

There is an association between marital violence and marital rape.
A man might rape his intimate partner for many motives.

Causes of rape

Four major theoretical views of the nature of rape

• Victim-precipitated rape
  The view that rape is a result of a woman ‘asking for it’.
• Psychopathology of rapist
  Rape is an act committed by psychologically disturbed people.
  The deviance is responsible for the crime occurring
• Feminists
  Rapists are the product of gender-role socialization in our culture
• Social disorganization
  Crime rates, including rape rates, increase when the social organization of a community is disrupted.
  Under such conditions the community cannot enforce its norms against crime

Research indicates that a number of factors that contribute to rape, ranging from forces at the cultural level to factors at the individual level, including

• Cultural values
• Sexual scripts
• Early family influences
• Peer-group influences
• Characteristics of the situation
• Miscommunication
• Sex and power motives
• Masculinity norms and men’s attitudes

The role of alcohol in sexual assault

Research has established a link between alcohol consumption and sexual assault.

Two categories of effects of alcohol on the perpetrator

• Pharmacological effects
  The actual effects of the drug on the body and behaviour.
  Alcohol impairs higher cognitive functions
  • Decision making
  • Planning
  • Response inhibition
• Psychological effects
  Alcohol is glamorized in out culture and is widely believed to improve men’s sexual outcomes.
  People believe that drinking alcohol will make them more sociable and sexually uninhibited.
  This creates expectancy effects, and they can be powerful
  The expectancy effects can amplify the actual pharmacological effects.

Among men who are at risk of being a perpetrator, alcohol consumption makes them feel more justified in raping.

Rapists

There is no typical rapist.
Rapist tend to be repeat offenders.

Compared with other men, rapists tend to have the following characteristics

• They hold a number of social cognitions or ‘implicit theories’ that support rape.
• They are characterized by poor inhibition and self-regulation
• They lack empathy
• They may have experienced environmental triggers
• They are more likely themselves to have been victims of child sexual abuse

A major goal of treatment for rapist is to reduce the change of reoffending.

Men as victims or rape

Women are far more likely to than men to be victims of rape.
In cases of male rape victims, perpetrators are predominantly male.
Men who have been raped experience symptoms of PTSD and very negative psychological consequences.

Prison rape

Victims reported severe emotional consequences.

Ethnicity and rape

Cultural context can promote or inhibit rape and affect the meaning that people attach to rape.
African American women have a long history of non-disclosure of rape, a pattern that exceeds even that of white women.

Preventing rape

Strategies for preventing rape fall into three categories

• Avoiding situations in which there is a high risk of rape
• Knowing self-defence techniques in case a rape attempt is made
• Changing attitudes that contribute to rape

Avoid date-rape situations

• Set sexual limits
• Decide early if you would like to have intercourse
• Do not give mixed messages, be clear.
• Be forceful and firm
  Do not worry about being polite if your wishes are being ignored
• Do not do anything you do not want to do just to avoid a scene or unpleasantness
• Be aware that alcohol and other drugs are often related to date rape
• Trust your gut-level feelings
• If this first set of strategies does not work, self-defence strategies are needed

Self-defence is useful to the woman only in defending herself once an attack has been made.

Types of rape-prevention programs

• Awareness- based programs
• Empathy-based programs
• Social norms-based programs
• Skills-based programs
• Bystander intervention programs

Child sexual abuse

Patterns of child abuse

It is common for cases to go unreported.
Males are less likely to disclose than females are.

The great majority of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are men.

• Men in our culture are socialized more toward seeing sexuality as focused on sexual acts rather than as part of an emotional relationship
• The sexual script for men involves partners who are smaller and younger than themselves, whereas women’s sexual script involves partners who are larger and older

In the majority of cases, the activity involves only touching of the genitals.
It may occur at astoundingly young ages.
Most abusers are family friends and relatives.

Sexual solicitation on the internet: cases in which a sexual predator ‘meets’ a child or adolescent online, gains the youth’s confidence, and arranges an in-person meeting.

Incest: sexual activity between relatives.

Impact on the victim

The effects on the victim can be serious and long lasting.

If a case is reported and prosecuted, the child may be as traumatized by testifying in court as by the abuse itself.
Repeatedly testifying about severe abuse is associated with worse mental health outcomes.
The perpetrator receiving a light sentences is also associated with worse mental health outcomes.

Adults who were sexually abused as children display more

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Eating disorders
• Alcohol and drug dependence
• Negative feelings about sex
• Difficulty forming stable, safe romantic relationships

The risk of these difficulties is greater if attempted or completed intercourse occurred, the abuse was by a relative, and if the victim told someone and received a negative response.

Adult survivors of child sexual abuse are also more likely to experience sexual disorders

• Fears of sex
• Lack of sexual desire
• Lack of arousal
• Women who were sexually abused as children are more likely to be preoccupied with sex
• Boys are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviours

Child sexual abuse has effects on physical health

Childhood sexual abuse may not be damaging to the victim in some cases.
But, in most cases it is psychologically damaging, and may lead to symptoms such as depression and PTSD.

Treatments such as CBT are available and effective in treating adults with PTSD following child sexual abuse.

The offenders

Pedophilia: an adult having sexual activity with a prepuberscent child.
To meet the official criteria for diagnosis, the person must have intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviours, over a period of at least 6 months, that involve sexual activity with a prepuberscent child.
It is a paraphilia.

At least some people who experience pedophilic urges never act on them.

Pedophiles tend to be repeat offenders, and their pattern of preference tend to be stable over time.

Child molesters score low on measures of heterosexual competence.

Some injury to the developing brain may create this disorder in some cases.
Pedophiles have a strong mental association between children and sex.
Also more arousal for child pornography than to adult pornography.

Most experts believe that pedophilia itself cannot be changed.
The best that we can hope for with treatment is to increase the individual’s voluntary control over acting on those urges.

A number of treatments for pedophilia are in use

• Surgical castration
• Antiadrogen drugs
• SSRIs
• Behaviour therapy
• Cognitive-behavioural therapy

There is not strong evidence of the success of either of either kind of treatment.

Sexual harassment

Sexual harassment: unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favours, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment.
The key ingredients for sexual harassment are that the sexual advances are unwelcome and are coercive in the sense that the victim’s job or grade is at stake.

Sexual harassment at work

Sexual harassment at work may take a number of different forms.
It is common.

Sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military have become a serious problem.

Victims report that harassment has negative effects on their emotional and physical health, their ability to work with others on the job, and their feelings about work.

Men who are sexual harassers tend to be repeat offenders.

Why does sexual harassment at work occur?

• A combination of gender stereotyping and men’s ambivalent motives
  Four types of harassment
  • Earnest harassment
    The man is truly motivated by a desire for sexual intimacy, but he won’t take no for an answer and persists with unwelcome sexual advances
  • Hostile harassment
    The man’s motivation is domination of the woman
  • Paternalistic-ambivalent harassment
    The man is motivated by a desire for sexual intimacy but also by a paternalistic desire to be like a father for the woman
  • Competitive-ambivalent harassment
    Mixes real sexual attraction and a stereotype of women as sexy with the man’s hostile desire to dominate the woman, which is based on the belief that she is non-traditional and competitive with him

Sexual harassment in education: an a for a lay

Women report dropping courses, changing majors, or dropping out as a result of sexual harassment.

Doctor-patient sex

This is particularly serous in psychotherapy because people have opened themselves up emotionally to the therapist and are extremely vulnerable emotionally.