In the last section/module we considered the sociological aspects of rape and how societal values and attitudes can create a rape culture, which can normalize sexual violence and, in some cases, make it appear acceptable and permissible etc.
However, at the end of the day, sex crimes are committed by some individuals and not others, meaning as well as there being a sociological aspect/component to sexual violence, there is also a psychological one i.e., why do some men rape and not others?
Also, the way in which sexual assaults are committed varies e.g., in some instances, more force and violence is used than is necessary to control the individual being victimized, and in others there may be a process that is almost ritualistic i.e., not all sexual violence is the same because it serves different purposes for different individuals.
For some sexual predators, anger is the primary motive and for others it may be a need to demonstrate power, both to the person they assault and to themselves.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, during the 2011–2012 period, approximately 4.0% of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff.
The vast majority of these assaults are not committed by homosexual offenders but heterosexual ones. Most CSA – Child Sexual Abuse – cases are committed not by pedophiles who are primarily attracted to children. Most are committed by teleiophiles; those who are primarily sexually attracted to adults.
These things indicate that these offenses are motivated by something other than simple sexual gratification, or that other factors, such as a need to dominate another person, beyond a physical attraction need to exist in order to satisfy a person sexually i.e., sexual violence is more “complicated” than we may initially think.
Many rapists and sexual assailants have partners with whom they engage in consensual sex however they have fantasies that aren’t satisfied by this and so create and seek encounters that fulfill these other desires.
In this section we will look at some of the psychological aspects and motivations behind rape and sexual assault as well as some different classification systems for categorizing rapists. One of the issues with such systems is that there are individual offenders who don’t necessarily fit neatly into a particular “box”.
So, when we look at these systems, we should understand that an offender might actually have a “mix” of these different motivations, rather than just one. However, these classification/categorization systems allow us to better understand the psychological aspects of sexual violence.