Who Commits It?
Inaccurate stereotypes and misconceptions about who rapists are continue to exist, making confronting sexual assault more difficult for communities working to prevent it, criminal justice agencies responsible for response and prosecution when the crime is reported, and perhaps most importantly, for victims themselves. Most publicity about sexual assault involves cases of assaults by strangers, and most programs aimed at teaching people how to protect themselves focus on attacks by strangers. And certainly, strangers do target women, men and children. As frightening as these crimes are, for many people it’s easier to conceive of a stranger committing sexual assault than to accept that someone the victim knows could perpetrate such harm and violation.
However, that’s exactly what happens. By far the larger number of both child and adult sexual assault victims know the person who assaults them.
According to the 2005 Department of Justice National Crime Victimization Study someone known to the victim committed 73% of reported sexual assaults. Of these, 38% were friends or acquaintances, 28% were intimate partners, and 7% were relatives.[i]
However, most sexual assaults are never reported.
- In 2005, only 38.3% of rape/sexual assaults were reported to police – the violent crime least often reported to law enforcement.[ii]
- 88 percent of child sexual abuse is never reported to the authorities.[iii]
The misconception that most perpetrators are strangers is increased to some extent because victims of sexual assault are more likely to report the crime when their attackers are strangers: 41% of the rapes/sexual assaults committed by strangers were reported, compared with 27% committed by acquaintances/non-strangers.[iv]
Most social science research about sexual assault perpetrators has been done with incarcerated subjects because they are easily accessible for study. This population (crimes reported and investigated with successful prosecution) is representative of only a very small percentage of actual perpetrators thereby adding to the false perception that most sexual assaults are committed by strangers.
However, more recent research completed with men who have committed rapes which either weren’t reported or not prosecuted — the “undetected rapists” — clearly shows that the old stereotypes are false.
Dr. David Lisak has done extensive research with this population. In one sample of 1,882 men, 120 had committed 483 rapes of women they knew. Of these 120 rapists, 44 committed a single act of rape; 76 committed 439 rapes. None of these crimes were ever reported.[v]
This research does show one similarity with incarcerated rapists: a small number of men commit the majority of rapes. But it does not support the typical stereotypes about rapists.
The vast majority of rapists are:
- Known to the victim
- Have access to consensual sex
- Educated and employed
- From across racial and ethnic groups
Dr. Lisak’s research reveals the following characteristics about undetected rapists:[vi]
- Used alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious
- Were extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries
- Planned and premeditated their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically
- Used “instrumental” not gratuitous violence, exhibiting strong impulse control and using only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission
- Used psychological weapons: power, control, manipulation and threats backed up by physical force, almost never resorting to weapons such as knives or guns
Though the vast majority of sexual violence is committed by males, and Dr. Lisak’s as well as most other research, has focused on male sex offenders, there is growing awareness of sex crimes committed by females. Cases of inappropriate and illegal sexual contact between high school teachers and their male students have received increasing publicity and have the potential to add to myths and stereotypes about female offenders because they are not representative of the scope offenses by females.
“Information about the low proportion of sex offenses committed by females is fairly consistent, at least when relying on data about female sex offenders known to the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Yet when various individuals are surveyed about their sexual victimization experiences, the incidence of female-perpetrated sex crimes is often higher and much more variable.”[vii]
[i] U.S. Department of Justice. 2005 National Crime Victimization Study, 2005.
[ii] Catalano, Shannan M. Criminal Victimization, 2005. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2006. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv05.pdf
[iii]Hanson, R.F., Resnick, H.S., Saunders, B.E., Kilpatrick. D. G., and Best, C. “Factors Related to the Reporting of Childhood Sexual Assault.” Child Abuse and Neglect, 1999.
[iv] Hart, Timothy and Rennison, Callie. “Reporting Crime to the Police, 1992-2000.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003.
[v]Legal Momentum. The Undetected Rapist. http://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/vaw/njep-flyers/the-undetected-rapist-flyer.pdf,
[vi] Department of State Health Services. Undetected Rapists’ Behaviors (Lisak, 2002). http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/csot/csot_tundetected.shtm
[vii] Center for Sex Offender Management. Female Sex Offenders. http://www.csom.org/pubs/female_sex_offenders_brief.pdf