Focuses on the best way to resist rape. Study by University of
Nebraska researchers showing resistance was the best way to avoid rape;
Comments by study author Ann Coyne after a woman on campus was raped and
killed; Advice on what a woman should do from Judith Siegel, author of a
study of sexual assault.
By
PT Staff, published on May 01, 1994
Rape
A team of University of Nebraska researchers recently learned just
how difficult it is to give advice.
Several months ago, they published a study showing that
resistance--fighting back or screaming--was the best way to avoid rape.
Their study showed that only half the women who resisted, but nearly all
those who didn't, were raped. The results, which were based on police
reports, contradicted long-held assumptions that physical resistance
would backfire and increase brutality.
Soon after the story swept the popular press, a woman on campus was
raped--after doing just what the study suggested. "The young woman
apparently threatened to expose the identity of the man who broke into
her room," explains Ann Coyne, Ph.D., author of the study. "He got
frightened and strangled her to death." Later, in checking police records
for a description of the incident, Coyne made a startling discovery. "Her
case was listed as a homicide, not a rape. That opened up a truly fatal
flaw in the study: "It may be that ours was not a sample of everyone who
was raped in Omaha that year, but only those that the police categorized
as rape." Apparently the police were classifying those rape cases
involving major injuries or death as serious bodily assault or
homicide.
So what's a woman to do? Generalizations don't come easy. "Rapists
are not normal, so it's difficult to use basic rules of behavior to
predict what they will do," says Judith Siegel, Ph.D., of the University
of California at Los Angeles. In a study of sexual assault she conducted
in 1989, Siegel found that violent assailants completed the rape whether
the woman fought back or not.
Her advice: "With a physically violent assailant, it's probably not
going to make much difference whether you resist or not. But with an
assailant who uses verbal tactics, resistance is definitely the
appropriate strategy."
ILLUSTRATION
Tags:
assailant,
assailants,
brutality,
coyne,
generalizations,
judith siegel,
physical attack,
physical resistance,
police records,
police reports,
popular press,
rape,
rape cases,
rapists,
resistance,
sexual assault,
startling discovery,
university of california,
university of california at los angeles,
university of nebraska,
verbal attack,
young woman
