34

I have found the following statement on an article of feminism:

Do you know who think all men are rapists? Rapists do. They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

Do studies support that a significantly higher percentage of convicted or self-reported rapists think it is common to practice rape, in comparison to non-rapists?

Sklivvz
  • 78,578
  • 29
  • 321
  • 428
Oddthinking
  • 140,378
  • 46
  • 548
  • 638
  • 2
    I wonder if that applies to female rapists too? (That they think only men rape) – Ray Britton Dec 11 '11 at 12:50
  • I preferred the old version of this question. – John Rhoades Dec 13 '11 at 14:34
  • One of the speedbumps in this question is the definition of normal. Are you asking if rapists think rape constitutes normal behaviour for them, or if rapists think rape constitutes normal behaviour for everyone? – Polynomial Dec 15 '11 at 17:17
  • @Polynomial: When the question title is put in context of the quoted claim, I think it is clear that it means the latter. – Oddthinking Dec 15 '11 at 19:15
  • This seems to depend on your definition of rape. Many people consider coercion to be rape, sex with children to be rape, that sort of thing. But others consider badgering women until they sleep with them to be "game", and a completely normal thing. – dont_shog_me_bro Apr 12 '18 at 09:24
  • @dont: Some people confuse sexual harassment, sexual assaults and rape. I don't believe the original claimant did. Including or excluding 'statutory' rape - i.e. with 'consenting' children - I am happy to leave to the answerer. – Oddthinking Apr 12 '18 at 12:04
  • @Oddthinking in the context of an article about feminism, where the mainstream view is that rape and sexual assault are more or less interchangeable words, it matters rather a lot. Anyway, what does the definition of the word have to do with "pickup artists" and the like? – dont_shog_me_bro Apr 12 '18 at 13:05
  • @dont_shog_me_bro: Without accepting your claim about what is mainstream within this context, you earlier described constantly badgering women for sex. Unwanted sexual advances clear fit under sexual harassment, not under rape. Please avoid clouding the terms to minimise the seriousness of the claim. The question is not about what sexual harassers or pickup artists think. It is what rapists think. – Oddthinking Apr 13 '18 at 01:00
  • Non-consensual sex is rape. Badgering until someone if unable to refuse, often using psychological tricks to increase the pressure or simply refusing to take no for an answer, is rape. Don't make excuses for that behaviour, it's not harassment, it's rape. – dont_shog_me_bro Apr 13 '18 at 07:59
  • @dont: *shrug* I don't think this conversation is helping answer the question. – Oddthinking Apr 13 '18 at 12:53
  • @Oddthinking I'm contemplating an answer where I reference pickup-artist rape manuals like RooshV's infamous "Bang" series. In particular there is a paragraph where he recalls a woman telling him "no Roosh" repeatedly but he feels that has he has "put the effort in" he has a moral right to rape her. – dont_shog_me_bro Apr 16 '18 at 09:34

2 Answers2

25

I've been trying to answer some of the old, highly-voted unanswered questions recently - which brings me to this attempt to answer one of my own. This has been one of the less fun topics to research; some of the concepts below are distasteful (but not explicit.)

Depends What 'Normal' Means

It turns out I accidentally hit on a key issue in the question title "Do rapists think rape is normal?"; I need to elaborate on a subtle distinction.

One issue is whether or not someone sees rape as a common or typical action for men.

Another issue is whether or not someone sees rapists as "normal" - e.g. agrees more with the statement that `Rapists are "normal" men.' than the statement `All rapists are mentally sick.'

Even though I do not show whether or not rapists see rape as more common than "regular" people, I will show below that they do NOT see rape as more normal than "regular" people.

I believe that it is a reasonable leap to think if they don't see rape as any more normal, they won't think that typical men are rapists, and thus this is counter-evidence for the claim made in the question.

The Evidence

Feild: Survey of 20 rapists and 1174 non-rapists

A key study in this area is by Feild:

Feild conducted surveys of many men (n=528), many women (n=528), many police officers (n=258), many female counsellors from a rape crisis centre (n=118) and a small number convicted rapists in a mental hospital (n=20).

Note: This was back in 1978. Society's opinions about women and rape have changed a lot in the past 30-odd years [Ref: Segal and Stermac (1985), that I will introduce further below].

The surveys asked a number of questions about their attitude to rape, and they were processed to give each person a score along a number of axes. That is, each person was given a rating according to a number of factors:

  1. Woman's Responsibility in Rape Prevention;
  2. Sex as Motivation for Rape
  3. Severe Punishment for Rape
  4. Victim Precipitation of Rape
  5. Normality of Rapists
  6. Power as Motivation for Rape
  7. Favorable Perception of a Woman After Rape
  8. Resistance as Woman's Role During Rape

Factor 5 is the relevant factor for this discussion.

Now, the variability in Factor 5 was partially accounted for by a number of determinants: Race (classified as Black or White), Marital Status, Knowledge about Rape all had a correlated with opinions on Factor 5. For some of the subgroups, some other variables were correlated: For regular Men and Women, their attitude toward women also played a part on their opinion on Factor 5. For police officers, their years of education played a part.

However, in the critical question of whether the grouping of the respondents into Citizens, Rapists, Police officers and Counsellors, it turns out Factor 5 is only statistically significantly different for the counsellors. That is, there was not a significant difference between citizens, rapists and police officers when it came to their attitudes about the normality of rape.

Table from the Feild study

This is the key table from the study. It is tricky to understand. The important point to notice is that the numbers against "Normality of Rapists" under Citizens and under Rapists both have the same a super­script, indicating they are not significantly different (at p < 0.05).

Summarising the weaknesses of this evidence: it's about "normality" not frequency, it is from 1978, the sample size of rapists isn't huge and all the rapists were drawn from a mental hospital.

Nonetheless, it shows the attitudes of regular people and rapists were not significantly different when it came to the normality of rapists.

Segal and Stermac: Survey of 40 rapists, 40 other offenders and 40 non-rapists

I'm veering a little off-topic here, but I think this addresses some of the questions about the above study.

In a response to the Feild study, in 1984 Segal and Stermac attempted to address some of its shortcomings.

They increased the sample size to 40 rapists - importantly, they sampled 20 from a mental institution and 20 from a regular prison. They also only took respondents with an above average IQ (the reason for this is unclear).

To control for institutionalisation, they compared them against 40 non-sex offenders who had been imprisoned. They also compared to 40 citizens, but they were careful to match against equivalent men at the same low socio-economic status and intelligence.

They used a standard "Attitudes to Women" questionnaire. As an aside, they noticed that the community standards for the attitudes for women had changed a lot (become more liberal) since the questionnaire had been first measured, a decade earlier in 1973.

They were surprised by the results:

Contrary to predictions made, rapists at both centres did not differ from other offenders or from community based males, in their perceptions of women’s roles.

...

The findings reported are also consistent with research indicating little difference between rapists and other low SES men on measures of social competence (Segal & Marshall, 1985; Stermac & Quinsey, in press). In fact, in the Segal and Marshall study, only high SES men differed significantly from rapists and low SES controls in their attitudes towards women and on other indices of heterosexual social skill.

Now, this study has strayed even further from the original question. It is asking about attitudes to women, not if rape is normal or if rape is common. However, it is important because it supports the view that rapists do not have a vastly different attitudes to their non-sex-offending peers.

Feelgood et al: Survey of 25 rapists, 36 child molesters and 25 violent offenders

Another survey looking at the attitudes, coping skills and cognitive distortions of rapists was examined as part of a Masters dissertation by Steven Feelgood.

  • Steven Feelgood, Franca Cortoni, Anthony Thompson, Sexual coping, general coping and cognitive distortions in incarcerated rapists and child molesters,Journal of Sexual Aggression, Vol. 11, Iss. 2, 2007, DOI:10.1080/13552600500073657

Rapists did not report more support for rape-supportive distortions than the violent offender comparison group. [...] Evaluation of these comparisons was aided by effect sizes. The effect sizes reveal that there may indeed be differences between rapists and the comparison group with respect to cognitive distortions and sexual coping.

Again, rapists did not have strongly different views to their non-sex-offender peers.

The Conclusion

While this isn't a knock-down argument, it is strong evidence against the claim. In study after study, rapists do not have attitudes to rape that differ from similar control groups.

The evidence certainly isn't as clear cut in the other direction ("it comes out again and again") as the original claimant would suggest.

Oddthinking
  • 140,378
  • 46
  • 548
  • 638
  • 1
    Big hat-tip to @Borror0, who helped me gather some of the evidence. Any errors are, of course, mine. – Oddthinking Mar 06 '12 at 15:49
  • @Oddthinking-- am I reading the table correctly in that the overriding factor in rapists' thinking is that women can prevent rape? Does this counter the claim made in this question:http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3028/is-a-woman-who-dresses-sexually-suggestively-more-likely-to-get-raped ? – mmr Mar 06 '12 at 17:14
  • @MMR, Note: The paper is about *attitudes*, where that other question is about actual risks. What this paper could tell you is where police officers in 1978 were likely to agree with the one quoted in that question. – Oddthinking Mar 06 '12 at 17:43
  • 1
    @mmr: In the paper, researchers asked whether the subjects agree to statements such as "A woman can be raped against her will." or "In forcible rape, the victim never causes the crime." which are then weighted on how much the researcher feel it influences the eight factors investigated. The scores you see for *Woman's responsibility in rape prevention* represent whether each demographic believe women can prevent rape or if it is out of their control. – Borror0 Mar 06 '12 at 17:52
  • @Borror0-- so does a score of 0.69 mean that most of the rapists believe that a woman can prevent rape? I'm just trying to get a sense of what the numbers mean. If I'm reading it properly, then that would contradict the answer to the other question. While everyone who's _not_ a rapist says that women cannot prevent the rape, if the rapist says that a woman can prevent it, how would that affect those answers? – mmr Mar 06 '12 at 21:49
  • I had to go brush up on some stats techniques I don't normally encounter while reading this paper. My understanding: 0.69 means the rapist's average attitude rating is more towards the "Woman are responsible" end of the scale, by a total of is 0.69 standard deviations compared to the average of everyone sampled (0.66 compared to just the public) and that that is statistically significant. – Oddthinking Mar 07 '12 at 00:30
  • Now, "0.66 standard deviations" is hard to grasp intuitively, so for illustrative purposes only, I mapped it to human height. If each attitude corresponded to the height of a [19-year-old male American](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf), then 0.66 standard deviations (std err=0.91, std dev = sqrt(n=271)*std err), means the average height of the rapist's attitudes is 9.9cm (almost 4 inches) taller. – Oddthinking Mar 07 '12 at 00:43
  • @mmr: How would these attitudes "affect those answers"? Impossible to say from this data. Do rapists get these attitudes before or after the act and the process of being incarcerated? Do these attitudes affect their behaviour, and if so by how much? These answers aren't available in this report - however, I've found there are a LOT of studies out there on this sort of subject. – Oddthinking Mar 07 '12 at 00:46
  • I have substantially added to this answer, in response to some feedback from @Borror0. – Oddthinking Mar 14 '12 at 13:17
  • @Chad: I am not saying that isn't an issue, but it isn't relevant here. The original claimant was talking about the problem of men knowingly committing rape and thinking all men did it. – Oddthinking Mar 14 '12 at 22:42
  • 2
    @Oddthinking from the source claim *6% of college-aged men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word "rape" isn't used in the description of the act* It is the core of the claim – Chad Mar 15 '12 at 12:55
  • @Chad, this is slightly awkward, because the original comment that I was defending against was deleted, and I can't see any disagreement with the new comment. If you still have a concern with my answer, kindly re-state it, because I am, perhaps ignorantly, happy that we are agreeing. – Oddthinking Mar 15 '12 at 13:15
6

I think that this post references the study which is discussed in the feminist article that you site: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2009/11/12/rapists-who-dont-think-theyre-rapists/

My interpretation of the statement, is that the men who commit these "casual rapes" (for lack of a better term) don't consider their behavior to be actual rape (it is).

From the post:

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.

Given this information, we see that these men will admit to engaging in the behavior described above (rape) but not to "rape". Thus, if "rape" is abnormal, and "not rape" is normal, one can infer that these men see their actions as "not rape" and therefore normal.

SIMEL
  • 29,037
  • 14
  • 123
  • 139
Christine
  • 61
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
    [Welcome to Skeptics](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/1505)! Here are the two studies which are ultimately referenced ([1](http://www.wcsap.org/sites/www.wcsap.org/files/uploads/webinars/SV%20on%20Campus/Repeat%20Rape.pdf), [2](http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA519627)). Please add the links in your answer along with a relevant citation. I got to them through [this blog post](http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/) which was linked by your reference. – Sklivvz Jan 05 '13 at 20:07
  • Please note though, that neither support the thesis in question. They are studies about a subset of not convicted repeat rapists and they are sticking to the legal definition of rape (and not the more violent forms). They are in no way representative of "rapists" and "rape" as it's commonly understood. – Sklivvz Jan 05 '13 at 20:09
  • 2
    @Sklivvz : The core of this question lies on the way "rape" is commmonly understood. The person who's quoted in the question has an understanding of what "rape" means that corresponds to the understanding to the term in the post that Christine links to. – Christian Jan 05 '13 at 20:26
  • In no way one can only consider "rape", "unpunished and non physically violent coercion to have sex". Certainly "punished" and "physically violent" rape acts *should* count as rape for anybody – Sklivvz Jan 05 '13 at 20:29
  • 2
    @Sklivvz : Yes, those acts count as rape. That still doesn't mean that those people are representative of all rapists (the person who wrote the orginial article considers 6% of the male population to be rapists). On of the reason we punish people is to change the way they think about the act they committed. Those rapists in mental facilities also got psychologists who explain to them that rape is bad. If those psychologists are of any use than the rapists had a worse beliefs at the time he raped, than at the time he's questioned here. – Christian Jan 05 '13 at 21:44