Scary study about men and rape

Read this bit

Approximately 32 percent of study participants said that they would have “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if ‘‘nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences.’’ Yet only 13.6 percent admit to having “any intentions to rape a woman” under these same circumstances. With the exception of one survey that was not counted because of inconclusive answers, all of the men who admitted to rape intentions also admitted to forced intercourse intentions. (Worth noting: Though the legal definition of rape varies from state to state, these researchers are using the widely agreed upon definition of the word as “intercourse by use of force or threat of force against a victim’s wishes.”)

from this Newsweek article about a December study in the journal Violence and Gender.  If you don't trust the summaries, check out the hard data in the study itself.

You may want to dismiss the study because it involved only 86 college-age men, but that's enough of a sample to be, at a minimum, disturbing.

I believe the study is at least directionally correct.  That 13.6% of the men in the study would admit to rape intentions is astounding; that nearly 32% would admit to the same thing under a different name is even worse. 

If you believe that young men going off to college understand that rape is bad, this data strongly suggests that your belief is wrong for a significant fraction of those men.  We need to keep educating men that rape is a horrific crime that is simply wrong, regardless of whether anyone would know about it.  We need to educate them that forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse is rape. 

A letter from RAINN to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault makes the point that those college men who commit rape represent a very small percentage of the male college population.  Even if that data is true--as I hope it is--I still believe that this new study means we need to improve our education of all young men.  I don't believe education alone will stop that small percentage of young men from committing rape, but it might stop some of them, and it might increase the peer pressure on them to behave better. 

We have to try.