Constructing Coercion: The Organization of Sexual Assault

There is an abundance of research on how perpetrators organize and orchestrate their activity during the commission of burglary, robbery, and homicide. By contrast, there is very little research on how perpetrators organize sexual assaults. Based on interviews with 33 incarcerated rapists who acted...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of contemporary ethnography 2005-06, Vol.34 (3), p.284-316
Main Authors: Monahan, Brian A., Marolla, Joseph A., Bromley, David G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aggression
Coercion
Criminology
Ethnography
Ethnology
Family. Family relations
Interviews
Motivation
Perpetrators
Planning
Premeditation
Prisoners
Qualitative research
Rape
Selfawareness
Sex crimes
Sex Offenders
Sex, gender, sexuality
Sexual Assault
Social structure and social relations
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Summary:There is an abundance of research on how perpetrators organize and orchestrate their activity during the commission of burglary, robbery, and homicide. By contrast, there is very little research on how perpetrators organize sexual assaults. Based on interviews with 33 incarcerated rapists who acted alone and had little or no prior social connection to their victims, we describe rape events in terms of a sequential series of phases that are analogous to those employed to analyze homicides and robbery. The five phases of the kind of rape events we describe include (1) preexisting life tensions, (2) transformation of motivation into action, (3) perpetrator-victim confrontation, (4) situation management, and (5) disengagement. We also argue that within these five phases, perpetrators exhibit differential awareness of their own actions, apply divergent meanings to apparently similar actions, and engage in different degrees and types of organization.
ISSN:0891-2416
1552-5414
DOI:10.1177/0891241605274555