Reducing the prevalence of date rape

Photo Credit: Columns
Thu, 06/15/2017 - 15:19

Dennis McChargue

Faculty member Dennis McChargue with colleagues Antover Tuliao, graduate student in the Department of Psychology, and Lesa Hoffman, faculty member at the University of Kansas, recently published “Measuring individual differences in responses to date-rape vignettes using latent variable models" in the journal Aggressive Behavior.

We sat down with Dennis to learn more.

~ ~ ~

What interested you about doing this study?
Date rape is an all too frequent reality which has serious repercussions on the mental well-being of survivors. Very little has been known about how people assess benefits and risks, and their decision processes, which may lead to a date rape situation. Exploring the decision processes under the ambiguous scenarios that may lead to date rape can help us understand the situations in which date rape occurs, and to develop interventions to reduce its prevalence among potential predators.

What were your research questions?
Previous research to examine these issues have used a vignette paradigm in which participants assess such things as intent to sexually aggress, potential for sexual victimization, risk perception, perception of sexual intent, and sexual arousal, but have done so with vignettes that do not characterize the sequences of different scenarios that may ultimately lead to date rape.

Hence we created a more dynamic vignette that included different sequences of physical intimacy, which escalated along a continuum of initial consensual sexual activities, later ambiguous events (such as a man apologizing for advancing the level of sexual activity), and ultimately sexually coercive events. We sought to determine whether our women participants would differentiate these three different processes based on their comfort levels measured along the different sequences of our vignette.

What did you find?
We found that our participants did differentiate these three different processes, which indicates that people are sensitive to various stages that may lead to date rape.

What are the practical implications of your findings?
This study serves as only one snapshot in an overall research program. My interests are to examine date rape scenarios from the perspectives of both sexes. Along with my research team, we are currently examining the responses of men, in terms of measuring their expected utility of both positive and negative outcomes along these different sequences of physical intimacy.

Our ultimate aims are to take advantage of our methodology to develop intervention programs among potential perpetrators of date rape so as to increase their understanding of the signals of women who are experiencing discomfort with their sexual advances so that nonconsensual sex will be avoided.