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A series of male victims of rape are presented who were identified following referral to a Forensic Psychiatric Service. In addition to being victims they were also offenders in their own right. The 22 male rape victims represent 12.5 per cent of male referrals to the service over a six-month period.
The authors have developed and tested scale-up methods, based on a simple social network theory, to estimate the size of hard-to-count subpopulations. The authors asked a nationally representative sample of respondents how many people they knew in a list of 32 subpopulations, including 29 subpopulations of known size and 3 of unknown size. Using these responses, the authors produced an effectively unbiased maximum likelihood estimate of the number of people each respondent knows. These estimates were then used to back-estimate the size of the three populations of unknown size. Maximum likelihood values and 95% confidence intervals are found for seroprevalence, 800,000 +/- 43,000; for homeless, 526,000 +/- 35,000; and for women raped in the last 12 months, 194,000 +/- 21,000. The estimate for seroprevalence agrees strikingly with medical estimates, the homeless estimate is well within the published estimates, and the authors' estimate lies in the middle of the published range for rape victims.
Criminal psychological profiling has progressively been incorporated into police procedures despite a dearth of empirical research. Indeed, in the study of serial violent crimes for the purpose of psychological profiling, very few original, quantitative, academically reviewed studies actually exist. This article reports on the analysis of 62 incidents of serial sexual assault. The statistical procedure of multidimensional scaling was employed in the analysis of this data, which in turn produced a five-cluster model of serial rapist behavior. First, a central cluster of behaviors were identified that represent common behaviors to all patterns of serial rape. Second, four distinct outlying patterns were identified as demonstrating distinct offence styles, these being assigned the following descriptive labels brutality, intercourse, chaotic, and ritual. Furthermore, analysis of these patterns also identified distinct offender characteristics that allow for the use of empirically robust offender profiles in future serial rape investigations.
Cognitive distortions are commonly viewed as an important factor in the assessment and treatment of sexual offenders. However, consensus about the operational definition of cognitive distortions and the best instrument to measure such distortions is lacking. This paper evaluates the Bumby MOLEST and RAPE scales as measures of cognitive distortions with patients civilly committed under California's Sexually Violent Predator law. Rapists and child molesters in the current sample endorsed markedly fewer cognitive distortions than the sexual offenders in Bumby's original study (K. M. Bumby, 1996). It is suggested that current self-report measures such as the MOLEST and RAPE scales are too susceptible to a socially desirable response set to provide useful data with sexual offenders who are involuntarily committed for treatment.
Based on a review of theory and evidence, this article highlights the limitations of trauma response models and applications of posttraumatic stress to characterize the experiences of women who are raped. There are two primary problems with trauma response theories. First, traditional notions of trauma are likely too narrow to accurately capture the complexities of women's experiences of sexual violence in a gendered society. Second, the symptoms emphasized by clinical applications of the trauma model may legitimate one sociocultural manifestation of distress while excluding others. Alternative conceptualizations are presented to stimulate more ecologically grounded and culturally inclusive study of sexual violence. Using the rape of women as an example, this article illustrates the limitations of Western views of trauma and encourages researchers and practitioners to expand notions of survivors' responses to painful events.
Twelve women, reporting rape to the police, were interviewed on three occasions over a 4-month period. Their psychological and behavioural experiences, during that time, were compared with those of 12 controls: women who were attending a Family Planning Clinic and without a history of such trauma, and small numbers of victims of non-sexual assault. All victims showed, initially, high levels of distress or some psychopathology but only the rape victims were reliable in attending follow-up appointments. In all but one case the acute, intense symptoms of distress resolved, but other substantial changes in lifestyle had taken place. The particular difficulties in counselling and research in this area were highlighted by this pilot work. Would-be counsellors should be cautious about taking on this kind of work unless considerable practical and emotional support is available to them.
Rape results in mental and physical health, social, and legal consequences. For the latter, restorative justice-based programs might augment community response, but they generate controversy among advocates and policy makers. This article identifies survivors' needs and existing community responses to them. Survivors feel their legal needs are most poorly met due to justice system problems that can be summarized as attrition, retraumatization, and disparate treatment across gender, class, and ethnic lines. Empirical data support each problem and the conclusion that present justice options are inadequate. The article concludes by identifying common ground in advocacy and restorative justice goals and calls for a holistic approach to the needs of rape survivors that includes advocating for expanded justice alternatives. A call to action is issued to implement restorative alternatives to expand survivor choice and offender accountability. Conventional and restorative justice are often viewed as mutually exclusive whereas the author argues they are complementary.
South Africa has one of the highest cases of HIV/AIDS infection in Africa, and Transkei, a former black homeland, now a part of the Eastern Cape Province, is one locality with a large number of HIV/AIDS sufferers. The unemployment level is very high and crime, including child rape, is very common. This report presents the case of a victim of rape, a nine-year old female child who was brought to the Umtata General Hospital, a victim of the mistaken belief that sex with a virgin will cure an HIV-infected person or AIDS sufferer of his illness. The alleged rapist was an HIV-positive uncle of the child. The myth of the 'HIV/AIDS virgin cure' is prevalent in the community. The history, physical examination and laboratory investigations of this case are given. A conclusion is drawn and preventive methods are suggested.
Male-on-male rapes and sexual assaults comprise fewer than 10% of such assaults reported to the police, and so many physicians seldom encounter them. This paper provides an overview of the nature of sexual assault encountered by males, ensuing injuries, and comparisons with male-on-female assault cases. The retrospective epidemiological study was on two cohorts seen at St. Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre, Manchester. The participants were Centre clients seen between October 1986 and mid-May 2003; 376 male eases (370 individual clients) and 7,789 female cases (7,403 individual clients). The main outcome measure was the presence of injury (abrasion, laceration, or bruise) to defined body areas. The results showed that 66% of male cases (when assault type was known) had been raped, significantly fewer than in female cases, (p 0.00, a 0.05, O.R. 0.474, 95% C.I. 0.357 to 0.63). Eighteen per cent of male cases that had a forensic medical examination presented with an anal injury, significantly more than in females (p 0.00, a 0.05, O.R. 6.101, 95% C.I. 4.216 to 8.829). Significantly fewer males than females sustained injuries to other body areas. The conclusion was that males were significantly more likely (six times) than females to receive at least one injury to the anal area. Even so, males are five times more likely to have no anal injury.
The emerging role of the social worker in the context of rape crisis programs housed in hospital emergency rooms is examined. A brief review of the psychological impact of rape on its victims is offered as a background for delineating this role. The emergency room setting is analyzed in terms of the advantages and disadvantages it presents for this type of crisis intervention. Significant issues of care for the social worker in this setting are discussed, and an outline of tasks for this role is proposed.
The present study examined the impact of resource loss on violent crime victims. Participants were 57 women who were recent victims of rape. Zero-order and point-biserial correlations and multiple hierarchical regression results indicated that psychological distress was followed by increased resource loss for rape victims. These results suggest that distress may be an underlying mechanism for resource loss in victims of sexual assault.
The ability to receive nonverbal facial cues was tested in twelve female victims of multiple nonserial rapes and matched controls. Subjects attempted to interpret nonverbal messages transmitted by male and female senders who were covertly taped while involved in a gambling task. Rape victims had significantly decreased ability to interpret the nonverbal facial cues of both male and female senders.
Subjects indicated the likelihood that a female, photographed in eight situations, would be raped. The situations were created by the Cartesian product of her dress (seductive/nonseductive), posture (aggressive/nonaggressive), and setting (inside/outside). The three variables combined additively with the highest subjective probability of rape associated with the seductive/nonaggressive/outside condition.
To test the argument made by abortion advocates that increases in unwanted pregnancies that are due to rape justify the need for legal abortions, a Pearson correlation was calculated between the forcible rape rates and the legal abortion rates in the USA for 1985. The calculation gave an r of .21, a nonsignificant value.
A study explored influence of pretrial publicity and gender identity on verdicts and severity of sentence in a mock rape trial. Mock jurors and judges were exposed to four pretrial publicity conditions before watching a simulated rape trial. After viewing the trial, jurors rendered a verdict (guilty or not guilty) and judges prescribed a sentence. The Bem Sex-role Inventory was used to analyze gender identity and its relation to verdict and sentencing. Verdicts were not influenced by pretrial publicity, but sentencing was more severe following exposure of mock judges to pretrial publicity about a mistaken acquittal and less severe following exposure of these judges to pretrial publicity about a mistaken conviction. Subjects classified by the Bem inventory as feminine or androgynous rendered a verdict of "guilty" more often than subjects classified as masculine or undifferentiated. Men who rendered verdicts of "guilty" had less confidence in their judgments than men who found the defendant "not guilty." Conversely, women who found the defendant "not guilty" expressed less confidence than women who found the defendant "guilty." The findings are compared and contrasted with similar studies and discussed in regards to gender identity, subjects' characteristics, and mode of presentation.
53 male college students and 37 male prison inmates completed a questionnaire evaluating an hypothetical rape scenario with a male perpetrator and a female victim. The college students assigned equal blame to the victim regardless of whether the assailant was a stranger or an acquaintance, but the inmates assigned more blame to the victim when the assailant was a stranger than an acquaintance. The results may be interpreted as showing a greater awareness of date or acquaintance rape among the college population than among the prison population.
College students, 232 women and 151 men, read a simulated trial of rape by an acquaintance under one of four conditions: victim only drinking, offender only drinking, and both drinking or neither drinking before the alleged assault. How much students blamed the victim or offender for what happened and their verdict were unaffected by these conditions. Yet students rated alcohol consumption as having contributed to the alleged assault. Apparently, they simply did not attribute blame to consuming alcohol. How much students blamed the victim and the offender and having been or having known a rape victim predicted jurors' verdicts with 89% accuracy.
Subjects in two studies were shown portraits of 32 young women who varied widely in physical attractiveness. Subjects were told that half of these women had been victims of a crime and half had not. Their job was to sort the portraits correctly into those two categories. In both studies, attractive women were more often categorized as victims of rape. In Study 2, attractive women were not more likely to be categorized as having been beaten and robbed. Correlation analyses showed that the association between physical attractiveness and presumed criminal victimization was significantly higher for rape than for being beaten and robbed.