Some general observations about this “evidence”.
The cited claims do not assert that “rape is all about power and not about sex”, which is the idea that I have critiqued. Yes, this idea is extremist, which is precisely what makes it so unscientific, and why only political motives would generate such a idea. The cited “works” (some such bald assertions)only assert a much more nuanced and limited claim that power and dominance play a major role in rape, leaving plenty of room for a significant influence of sexual arousal and desire for sexual gratification, especially in some types of rape such as the date rapes that I focused upon as being especially influenced by sexual goals. In fact, my arguments repeatedly acknowledge that power must be a part of rape as matter of definition, since sex without use of power to thwart a person’s will is not rape. I have also repeatedly pointed out that use of power varies and is more central to some types of rape. IOW, this “evidence” cited below isn’t actually relevant to the claim in question or any of the core aspects of my arguments, and if intended as I response to me is a classic case of goal post moving in which evidence presented is for a for more modest claim that isn’t under dispute as though it supports the more extreme claim that is in dispute.
BTW, the reason I took on the extremist position is not only because it is rampant in public discourse, but it the assumption that underlies how this issue of sex-vs-power arose in this thread. It is this extremist assumption the inherently underlies any accusations of “victim blaming” against people who merely raise the possibility that female behavior related to sexual signals can play a role in some forms of rape (accusations made here repeatedly), and this extremist position underlies claims made here (especially by Sabine) that any effort to raise the issue of victim behavior is “off-topic” and not relevant to the OP issue of rape-prevention. Such claims rest directly upon the assumption that sexual arousal and everything else related to sexual signals have zero relevance to any incidence of rape, including anything about to who, when, where, and how the rape occurs. Unless this extremist position is completely true, then the objections about raising victim behavior factors are invalid.
So, now onto the cited “evidence” for this other, more modest and not actually disputed claim:
In support of Sabine and the rape-as-power idea, I give you the following links:
MSU: Sexual Assault Myths
http://www.mnsu.edu/varp/assault/myths.html
UMD: List of RAPE MYTHS
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/3925/myths.html
Myth: Rape is sex.
Fact: Rape is experienced by the victims as an act of violence. It is a life-threatening experience. One out of every eight adult women has been a victim of forcible rape. (National Victim Center and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, 1992) While sexual attraction may be influential, power, control and anger are the primary motives. Most rapists have access to a sexual partner. Gratification comes from gaining power and control and discharging anger. This gratification is only temporary, so the rapist seeks another victim.
These first two are from a victims advocacy sites that list numerous claims, most without supporting evidence. No reasonable person thinks that advocacy groups rigorously stick to scientifically supportable assertions, so the link doesn’t give us reason to think there is evidence, just more claims. The fact that victims experience rape as violence and not sex is so grossly unrelated to the issue of whether rapists are impacted by sexual arousal that to put them together as though they are the same “myth” shows severe intellectual dishonesty or incompetence. Also, note that the underlined part of “Rape is sex” which acknowledges the influential role of sexual attraction on the part of the rapist, which supports my arguments and directly contradicts the actual idea in dispute that “rape is all about power and not about sex.” The first myth that “The primary motive for rape is impulsive sexual desire”, allows for 49.9% of the variance in rape probability in any given situation to be due to sexual desire and even more than that for particular sub-types of rape given this is a claim about what is true on average across rape types. Despite its compatibility with my critiques, let’s look the evidence they use to support the claim that rape is primarily about power. “ The only evidence is that “between 2/3 and 3/4 of sexual assaults are planned in advance.” The problem with that is clear when you simply substitute “sexual assaults” with “loving consensual sex” and realize that the statement is equally true. IOW, “advance planning” has no implications for underlying psychological motives beyond the fact that people often plan to satisfy their desires of all various types.
PubMed: Rape: power, anger, and sexuality
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/910975
Abstract
Accounts from both offenders and victims of what occurs during a rape suggest that issues of power, anger, and sexuality are important in understanding the rapist's behavior. All three issues seem to operate in every rape, but the proportion varies and one issue seems to dominate in each instance. The authors ranked accounts from 133 offenders and 92 victims for the dominant issue and found that the offenses could be categorized as power rape (sexuality used primarily to express power) or anger rape (use of sexuality to express anger). There were no rapes in which sex was the dominant issue; sexuality was always in the service of other, nonsexual needs.
(I personally like this one ↑↑ very much. It is meta-analytical and balanced.)
Unfortunately, my library won’t give me access to articles that old from that journal. But one thing that seems clear from the abstract is they used a selective sample of rapists, namely those caught and convicted of rape. Given the low reporting, arrest, and eventual conviction rates for rape in general, it is certain that particular subtypes of rape vary greatly in the odds of eventual convictions. It is highly likely that rapes by well known assailants, especially family members with whom one wouldn’t be expected to have consensual sex would be higher in conviction rates (because the victim knows who the perp is, its easy to find them, and any evidence of sex will be viewed more as evidence of rape than consensual sex). Other higher conviction rape types would be those by serial rapists, especially violent ones where the odds of forensic evidence is higher. Well, if you ranked the rape types by their likelihood of being motivated by power or anger, those by family members and violent serial rapists would be near the top. So, at best it tells us about a selective subset of rapes that differ in countless qualitative ways from other types of rape. But even for these subsets of rapists, their phrasing of the results imply that underlying motives was not measured in a clear objective way and instead the authors probably used therapy-based interviews (where the questions heavily determine the answers given), then constructed a coding scheme to use indirect information to categorize the rapes into primary motives. If they even have an clear and specified categorization rubric, such rubrics are inherently laden with a prior assumptions and thus cannot test any hypothesis that shares those assumptions). Even in a best case scenario rapist responses would likely focus heavily upon stated motives that make them rape at all rather than shed light on the precise details of why they raped the person they did, when they did, and how they did. Given the highly questionable science that came out of psychiatry in the 1970s, one really cannot glean anything without knowledge of these many critical methodological details about the sample, the setting, had the rapists already learned the therapeutic perspective at the time of data collection?, the questions asked of the rapists, the exact answers given, and the assumptions of the categorization scheme that was used.
Those are the just the kind of particulars that would be most impacted by sexual arousal and determine and relate to the probability of rape for a given situation and therefore relate rape prevention by victims and those around them. After all, the victim cannot prevent the rapist from being a person likely to rape. They can only prevent themselves or those around them from being the one that gets victimized. This makes so much of the information on what distinguishes a rapist from those who’d never rape of limited utility to the issue of what make a rapist rape the person they do, when they do, and how they do. Confusing these issue lead to erroneous inferences like “Rapists differ from non-rapists in the severity of their power and dominance issues, therefore whether a rape occurs in a given situation is unaffected by issues surrounding sexual arousal.” The latter does not follow from the former.
Finally, Togo cited a paper which he/she intended as support for the “rape is about power” meme but in fact reviewed evidence that sexual arousal is very much a driving factor in many rapes and that power is often just a means to an end, thus recommending interventions with some rapists that would be sure to backfire if power and dominance were their driving motivations. So, at best we have a body of literature that supports an important role for power, but also for sex and with varying roles for these depending upon the nature of the rape. Thus, “rape is all about power, and not about sex” is not scientifically supported and is in fact refuted and just as wrong as “Rape is only about sex, and has nothing to do with power”
