Forced Sex Not Rape, Some Women Say

American women are suffering “an epidemic of sexual assault,” say researchers who found that many young women did not consider forced sex to be rape while many men and women believed that submitting to unwanted attentions on dates can be acceptable.

A survey of 245 female and 194 male students at Washington State University in Pullman found “an alarming minority of students”--5% of women and 19% of men--do not believe that forcible rape on dates is definitely rape or that the male’s behavior is definitely unacceptable, said psychologist Gloria Fischer.

Those students said they believed forcing a date to have sex might be acceptable under any one of nine circumstances, including if the man spent a lot of money on the woman, if she led him on, if she had sex with other men, if she was intoxicated or if she excited him, Fischer said.

The study was one of several dealing with rape presented Friday at the annual meeting of a 1,000-member Society for the Scientific Study of Sex.

“Women are massively victimized in this society at all levels of their relationships, particularly women who are just beginning to date in high school and college,” said Wendy Stock, a Texas A&M; University psychologist who chaired a session titled “Coercive Sexuality.”

“There really is an epidemic of sexual assault,” said Diana Russell, a sociologist at Mills College in Oakland. “We have to recognize that as a society, do something about it and stop thinking this is something the psychologists alone can handle.”

In another study, Andrea Parrot, a Cornell University researcher, surveyed 595 students at the Ithaca, N.Y., school and 191 others at a nearby women’s college, which she declined to identify.

Among Cornell women, “19% reported they had intercourse against their will . . . through coercion, threats, force or violence. Yet only 2% said that they had been raped,” Parrot said. Among women at the small college, “18% reported having intercourse against their will. Only 9% indicated having been raped.”

Parrot explained: “If I define myself as a rape victim, then I have to deal with all of the emotional trauma that goes along with being a rape victim. If I don’t call myself a rape victim, I can say, ‘I didn’t want to,’ and, ‘He pushed me too far,’ but I’m not a rape victim. So to some extent it’s self-protective.”

But she also found that 12% of the women had experienced forced sex more than once, suggesting “these women did not learn from their mistakes.”

Fischer’s study found that men who did not believe rape during a date is wrong tend to believe men are superior to women. Russell, Stock and Parrot blamed that attitude for many sexual assaults.

“Males are taught they must pursue sex in order to be males, to fit into that image--that they must get as much as they can and almost at whatever cost,” Stock said.