Sexual Threat: Study Finds It Helps to Resist

People who resist sexual threats, in ways ranging from saying no to a kick in the groin, are less likely to be assaulted, according to a new academic study that contradicts some previous research. But the study’s authors concede that the more violent the assailant, the less effective the victim’s counterattack.

Fighting back is most likely to succeed when the attacker is making verbal, rather than physical, threats, according to the study by investigators from the UCLA School of Public Health, the RAND Corp. and the University of California School of Public Health. The study results appear in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The conclusions, which were based on the responses of 365 Los Angeles men and women who said they had faced sexual assault, contradict the work of some earlier investigators who concluded that resistance spurs attackers to behave more violently. The sample was chosen from a total of 3,132 who were interviewed.

The study immediately drew words of caution from some who work with rape victims and direct criticism from others, who maintain that it is wrong to focus on the behavior of rape victims rather than their assailants. The study itself, in its preamble, speaks to that issue in noting that victims of no other crime are “expected” to resist their assailants.

Judith Siegel, an associate professor at UCLA, said the major significance of the study may be that it drew its data from the general population, rather than from victims of reported crimes.

‘More Representative Sample’

“We have a much more representative sample of the population,” said Siegel, who noted that many victims of sexual assaults never report the crimes to authorities.

Also, she said, the study is one of the few that clearly, though broadly, defines the term “resistance.” Further study is needed, she said, particularly research that focuses on the chronology of a sexual assault and whose behavior affects whose.

Of those questioned in the current study, more than a third who had been attacked or threatened with attack said they had responded by verbally trying to reason with their assailant or saying such things as “I’ll tell your wife.”

A quarter of those surveyed said they offered no resistance at all.

Most of the people who reported fighting back said they did so only after they had already been harmed, so in many cases resistance itself could not have provoked violence, the researchers said.

Histories of Abuse

Victims who had been attacked as children and again when they were adults were more likely to resist the second time, either verbally or physically, according to the responses.

Children were the least likely to offer any protest to attack, the report said.

The respondents were chosen randomly and interviewed in person.

Rhonda Brinkley, director of the Rosa Parks Sexual Assault Crisis Center in South-Central Los Angeles, termed the study’s conclusion “another cookbook answer” on how not to be sexually assaulted.

“These studies take the whole focus off why (the victim) was being raped in the first place and puts the blame on her,” said Brinkley.

“What they need to be looking at is what (the assailant) could have done differently; what was in him that made him feel he had to rape somebody.”

No Formula

Brinkley and other rape counselors said that no formula can be presented to protect a woman from sexual assault.

“I just gave a seminar and a woman stood up and said that a man approached her, threatened to rape her and she got down on her knees and started eating grass,” Brinkley said. “That worked for her, but is it going to work for me?”

Personal Decision

Tawnya Jackson-Perry, associate director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, said women must decide for themselves how they should react.

“We try to teach women self-defense and then encourage them to decide whether they should even try to use it,” said Jackson-Perry.

“Only she sees the look in that rapist’s eyes, and that look is what tells her, ‘If I move, he’s going to cut me up or break my neck.’ ”