You know the guy who "accidentally" rapes women? The acquaintance who "misreads" the situation and "goes too far"? The longtime friend who genuinely thought you had consented, and is shocked when you tell him that, no, it was rape? Well, we're not going to take that guy's bullshit anymore. Thomas MacAulay Millar over at the Yes Means Yes! blog has crunched the numbers on "undetected" acquaintance rapists to figure out who this "accidental rapist" actually is.
Thomas looks at a study of 1882 college students who were asked four questions to determine if they had ever raped (or attempted to rape) anyone:
1) Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?
2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?
3) Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?
4) Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?
Questions like these are bound to lead to underreporting—what guy is going to admit to forcing a girl to give him head? As it turns out, a lot of guys will admit to this, 120 to be exact: That's six percent of the survey's respondents who copped to either rape or attempted rape. Importantly, Thomas notes, the survey does not actually ask these guys if they've ever exactly "raped" anyone:
If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.
And they didn't just admit to raping—they admitted to raping repeatedly (as long as it's not really "rape," of course!) According to the study, a small percentage of men are responsible for committing a large portion of sexual assaults—that's a whole lot of "accidents," "misreadings," and "gray areas":
Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.
What does this mean about our "accidental" rapists?
a) The vast majority of acquaintance rapes are committed by the same people;
b) These people don't see themselves as "rapists";
c) They are, however, able recognize that they regularly threat, force, and intoxicate women in order to have sex with them.
Oops! There's no "accident" here—these guys just deny, evade punishment, and repeat.
So, what do we do to stop these guys? Well, here's a start: Let's call them rapists. It's not just rapists who fail to recognize these behaviors—threatening, forcing, incapacitating—as "real" rape. We all have to stop making excuses for calling a rapist a rapist—and doubting, minimizing, or lashing out against the people who do use that word. Women need to know that they can call their experiences "rape" and report them as crimes. They need to know that they can call their rapists "rapists," even if the rapist is also someone's "friend," "acquaintance," "co-worker," "fraternity brother," or "respected member of our community." As Thomas says:
The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.
The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over—to believe that what happens to our friends—what our friends do to our friends—is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape.”
. . . The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.
That last point is an important one. People who excuse rapists usually see that equation from the other end: "He's my friend, so he can't be a rapist." We need to reverse that equation—"He's a rapist, so he can't be my friend." Perhaps them we could begin addressing why the dictionary definition of rape is overlooked—threatening, forcing, and incapacitating for sex—in our to avoid applying the word—"rapist"—to anyone we know.
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I think this is such a fantastic point:
That last point is an important one. People who excuse rapists usually see that equation from the other end: “He’s my friend, so he can’t be a rapist.” We need to reverse that equation—”He’s a rapist, so he can’t be my friend.” Perhaps them we could begin addressing why the dictionary definition of rape is overlooked—threatening, forcing, and incapacitating for sex—in our to avoid applying the word—”rapist”—to anyone we know.
I really wish that people saw it the same way with domestic violence. People seem to think that there is more than one side to take in those situations, which makes me physically ill.
Thanks for picking this up, Amanda. I've known about Lisak's study for months but I wrote about in in large part in response to the conversation that you have going in this space over the last few weeks.
I actually review two papers: Lisak & Miller's survey of 1882 college students, and Stephanie McWhorter's survey of over 1000 U.S. Navy recruits. The important thing is that, using large samples of different populations over different periods, the found the same thing: and a single-digit percentage of men report that they rape repeatedly, have an average of six victims each, and primarily attack acquaintances using intoxication.
There are lots of facets to sexual violence and lots of people that don't fit into the big part of that distribution, and I don't mean to ignore anyone's individual experience. But in talking about it, it helps to know what the relatively more and less common events and perpetrators are. And now we know. A smallish population of recidivists who use the tactics they use because they can get away with it. Knowing that allows us to contruct arguments and policies around how the actual world works, not how some people want to claim it works.
I'm glad you're reading what I'm writing.
Thanks, Thomas. Side-note: Everyone interested in what men can do to help prevent rape should read Thomas's full post, because it's really, really, good.
There are two problematic blind spots discussed here. First is with the rapist, who commits the act but doesn't fully account for what he did by calling his rape by its proper name. Second are the people around the rapist whose moderate responses don't match the extreme violation of a person's physical safety. There is this conspiracy of silence by all involved that the correct name for the act won't be applied. When everyone is doing the same thing, even when it's a bad thing, it's hard to change a whole society all at once.
What seems really hopeful about this study is that the researchers have found a way to get people to self-report something that is normally not self-reported. The opportunity here is to find out more about what happened from the perspective of the perpetrator. With more information about how the event came about, we could be in a position to catch more rapists who would otherwise get away, treat more victims who would otherwise suffer in silence, and best of all, prevent some rapes entirely.
Thomas, I'm not sure I agree. We all call rape what it is. The rapists won't do that. They are bad people. I don't think they will wake up one morning and see the error of their ways. They won't call it "rape" because they know they can't fight the social convention that "rape" is wrong, so they have to call what they do something else. See generally LaToya Peterson's The Not-Rape Epidemic, which I'm too pressed for time to find for you online.
It's the rest of us that have to impose the term, by calling it what it is. We're not going to change their hearts and minds. But we can change their risks and rewards.
As to the people around the rapist, that's the last third of my post.
A small note on business: I've updated the post to include Thomas' full pen name. And sorry for the initial slight, Thomas.
Thanks to ThomasMM and Amanda for highlighting these perpetration surveys. They are very important since too many people baselessly reject the validity of victimization surveys.
I believe that the types of rapes different men commit most often relate to the types of rapes those in our society most often excuse. The problem for the excusers who feel safe because they "haven't brought rape on themselves" is that those who act on those excuses may not limit themselves to the socially accepted victims.
Once rape becomes conditionally tolerable, the door has been opened to a rapist defining what is tolerable in ways that would make most excusers physically ill.
First, I think the studies are really striking. The two studies discussed are really insightful and powerful among many of the studies that I have read on this subject.
The one issue however that I take is the way Amanda actually frames these studies. She starts out with:
"You know the guy who “accidentally” rapes women? The acquaintance who “misreads” the situation and “goes too far”? The longtime friend who genuinely thought you had consented, and is shocked when you tell him that, no, it was rape? Well we're not going to take this bullshit anymore"
The studies were specifically about between the use or attempted use of force or specifically having sex with someone who was to intoxicated to resist.
Although these issues are definitely connected, there is a distinction between people who use or attempt to use force and those who fit into the gray areas that Amanda uses this study to write off.
A common gray area in college would be if both participants were to drunk to consent and the woman was actually happy with having sex afterward. In this case, the man (and the woman for that matter) committed rape, but certainly this rape exists in a real gray area. This really gets to the crux of the problem. Although rape is definitely defined by consent as it occurs, does there also have to be some sort of feeling of violation?
I personally think that these are really hard questions to answer and are not just bullshit. I guess on the other hand though, taking a deeper nuanced position does not necessarily help the cause of fighting the reality that there is an epidemic of rape.
Thank you so much for this and the link to Thomas MM's article. Obviously the studies are limited and can't cover everything, but as it says in the caveat, having any data at all is useful and important.
Something which I think it is important to state here is that whilst I am not sure what definition the study used, 'force' does not have to mean physical force alone, putting the pressure on until someone gives up saying no is using force too. It is NOT (as someone I know would insist) being 'persuasive' and thus OK to ignore what the other person wants until they stop stating what they want. This is one of the reasons 'yes means yes' is so important, because it's much harder to force someone to say 'yes' than it is to get them to stop saying 'no.' Though still not impossible, sadly.
Richard, I think the point is that if 95% of the incidents where men say they had sex with a partner too drunk to resist are committed by a relatively small group of men who are doing it again and again, it's not mistake -- it's a method. Why focus a lot of energy on the other 5% of incidents at the expense of the 95%?