Reflections on Researching Rape Resistance

Few accounts exist of researchers’ personal experiences doing research on the topic of resistance to rape. This essay gives a personal account of my experience coming to do research on this topic. Feminists inspired me early on, in particular Bart and O’Brien (1985), who wrote the now classic book, Stopping Rape: How Women Avoid Rape. That book compared characteristics of women who did, and did not, successfully avoid rape, and inspired my interest in studying how women escape rape situations successfully and which resistance strategies could help them do so. Around the same time, I read Liz Kelly’s (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence, another classic in the field. This book, with its qualitative accounts of women’s experience with rape, also inspired my interest in this work and helped me to connect the issue of rape resistance to rape recovery.

With the support of my advisor Raymond Knight, an eminent rape researcher studying sex offender typologies and the etiology of rape perpetration, I analyzed victim accounts of rape incidents to police, and how they resisted offender attacks in a sample of rapists incarcerated in a maximum-security treatment center for sexually dangerous persons (Ullman & Knight, 1992). I was interested in understanding how women could best avoid rape with resistance when faced with different types of offender attack strategies and found that women matched their assailants’ attack methods. I also expected that this very select, violent, repeat-offender population would be most difficult for women to escape from when attacked. I thought that if women could avoid rapes by these offenders, that information would be useful and give women the belief that resistance can be effective. In terms of the most important results, I found that women who fought back physically were more likely to avoid rape without incurring increased levels of physical injury than women who did not do so, controlling for the offenders’ prior physical attack (Ullman & Knight, 1992). This was critical in helping to dispel the notion that women who fight back are increasing their risk of physical injury, a correlation often found in research studies that did not control for the sequence of offender attack and victim resistance behaviors in the attack. In fact, women rarely resisted physically if not attacked with physical violence first, and their levels of physical injury were the same if attacked with physical force, regardless of how they resisted. This finding helped challenge the notion that women face a trade off in resisting rape forcefully—that is, that they may escape rape by fighting back (which is in fact more likely in such cases), but then experience more physical injury or precipitate escalation of the offender’s violence. Other research has also supported this finding (Quinsey & Upfold, 1985; Ullman, 1998) that fighting back does not lead to escalation of offender violence.

Studying rape resistance was both empowering and scary. I traveled to a maximum-security facility for sex offenders for a whole year to collect my dissertation data and saw the offenders daily, even while not doing my research in the same areas of the prison. I read accounts of the women and the perpetrators in paper files during that time, while collecting data for my dissertation. I found myself feeling fearful when reading the accounts of women and what happened to them. Like many rape researchers, I experienced symptoms of posttraumatic stress and vicarious trauma, including anxiety, fear, thoughts about the women, and concerns that the world wasn’t safe and every man was a potential offender. While I knew this was somewhat untrue in my rational mind, I still felt increased fear from reading these accounts all day long, day after day. I recall being especially afraid when reading about a female victim who had been a graduate student in the same town I was living in at the time when she was raped. I coped with my feelings of fear, helplessness, and horror by talking to graduate school and other feminist friends. Another thing that helped me counter some of the fear and helplessness I felt in reading these accounts and going to this facility day after day was taking a self-defense training class.

I wanted to know the answer to the question, “Does active resistance work?” Finding that, in a sample of victims of convicted rapists (Ullman & Knight, 1992), fighting, fleeing, and screaming reduced women’s odds of completed rape—whereas pleading, begging, and reasoning or not resisting did not—helped me to believe that it is possible to resist and avoid rape without fearing greater physical injury (see Ullman, 1997; 2007 for reviews). The fact that women who avoided rape completion also appeared to have better psychological outcomes (Bart & O’Brien, 1985; Kilpatrick, Saunders, Amick-McMullan, & Best, 1989; Ullman & Filipas, 2001) also meant that promoting rape resistance could be helpful to women’s mental health, as well as their physical health (e.g., lower sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy risk).

To me, however, women’s resistance was also political in that it was a way to resist the patriarchy by collectively taking an active stance against rapists and refusing such violence on individual and collective levels (see Gavey, 2007), similar to what was advocated by early radical feminists in their rallying cry, the personal is political (see Echols & Willis, 1989). If women fought back, perhaps there would be fewer rapists who thought they could so easily get away with it. While resistance would not completely stop rape or rapists, perhaps it would give them pause and show them that women would no longer “take it lying down,” so to speak.

Like others of my graduate school cohort, I was angry at male violence against women and the fact that I had to live in fear of rape and alter my behavior to avoid being attacked. Rape was a threat, not just from strangers but from trusted others and acquaintances. I knew this from other women’s stories and my own past experiences of sexual assault in college, one in which I resisted and avoided rape and another in which unfortunately I did not. I had known other rape victims in college who experienced violent blitz-style rapes or alcohol-related assaults, which in the mid-1980s no one labeled as rape. Later on in graduate school, I found reading Mary Koss’s (1985) groundbreaking work on “hidden rape” among college women rang true and was inspiring and influential in confirming that all of these assaults by non-strangers really were in fact “real rapes” (Estrich, 1987). Yet, I didn’t hear much talk about rape, except from feminists who participated in Take Back the Night marches in the Boston area where I lived at the time.

I felt that preventing rape was much too difficult, so that the better thing to do was try to give women better knowledge about how they might resist and get away from rapists given that rape wasn’t going away anytime soon. I also had no idea how to stop men from raping women in a culture that glorifies rape and socializes men to be violent and to measure a major part of their masculinity in sexual conquests of women. Of course, we now have a large field of research on rape prevention and more work going on than ever on this topic (Schewe, 2006), but we still have a long way to go to stop this crime (see also Funk, 1993).

As I did more studies on this topic and worked with graduate students later in my academic career, I realized that this was a topic that needed more attention, but not just in studies of stranger rapes, which were the minority of sexual assaults. We also needed to study resistance in the much more common known-offender rapes by dates, acquaintances, and intimate partners. Other feminists wrote about and gave a name to these known perpetrator offenses and the issue of rape avoidance (e.g., Bergen, 1996; Levine-MacCombie & Koss, 1986; Sanday, 1990). It became apparent that rape resistance could also work in acquaintance situations, but that there were more barriers to women resisting rape in these situations (Norris, Nurius, & Dimeff, 1996). Marital rape and intimate partner rape seemed even more problematic, and less research exists on this topic to this day (see Russell’s, 1982 classic Rape in Marriage and Bergen’s, 1996 book Wife Rape).

In terms of applying this knowledge to prevention or more accurately “risk reduction,” Rozee and Koss (2001) introduced the Assess, Acknowledge, Act (AAA) program, based on knowledge of social psychological barriers to resistance identified by Norris and information on self-defense training. It is heartening to see positive results evaluating this program when it is enhanced by sexuality education (Senn, Gee, & Thake, 2011), and evidence that combining information about barriers and rape resistance training reduces completed sexual assaults in women, regardless of prior victimization history (Orchowski, Gidycz, & Raffle, 2008).

Since my time as a graduate student, I fear rape less, mostly because I am older, married, and less likely to be a target given my life circumstances. However, I still think it is important to empower women to engage in resistance and self-defense, while not blaming them if they do not or cannot resist. Teaching women about resistance and giving them access to self-defense training is a critical way women can clearly say “no” to rape and rapists through their behavior every day.

My former graduate student and now Professor, Leanne Brecklin, has shown in her work on self-defense that women who take self-defense training experience many positive outcomes, including greater odds of engaging in resistance if later attacked (Brecklin, 2008; Brecklin & Ullman, 2005; see also Hollander, 2004). The connection between resistance and self-defense training is crucial, enhancing women’s avoidance of attacks and ability to escape when attacked, and improving their psychological recovery. Part of this may be because when women resist, and especially when they resist successfully, they are “good victims” of “real rapes” in being consistent with societal myths that for sex to be nonconsensual a woman must resist; otherwise, “she must have wanted it.” These myths and the expectations of many people, including the police and the criminal justice system, are still pervasive. We expect women to resist and get away; if they do not, it’s their fault and failure to be good sexual gatekeepers. If they resist and get raped, they are “less” blameworthy in that at least they tried, but they are still not as good as the valiant women who escape untainted. If they don’t resist, they are blamed for not defending themselves, they must have wanted it, it wasn’t really rape, and so on. Finally, if they do resist successfully, then it’s as though nothing happened to them (Cermele, 2010).

For various historical and social reasons, adherence to these myths has not changed very much (Edwards, Turchik, Dardis, Reynolds, & Gidycz, 2011), even though some evidence suggests that rape prevention education can alter rape myths at least for a while (Lonsway& Fitzgerald, 1994). In many societies, we are still attached to traditional gender roles through socialization processes occurring in families, and rape as a manifestation of gender inequality is intimately tied to those roles (Ullman, 2010). While some argue that male sexual aggression and female resistance or avoidance strategies are natural, explaining these in Darwinian terms (McKibbin & Shackelford, 2011), such arguments cannot be proven and can inadvertently serve to reinforce rape myths and “naturalize” rape as something inevitable that we cannot stop (see Travis, 2003 for feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology’s approach to rape).

Research that focuses on women’s inability to resist or women who freeze during attack documents what has been labeled a “tonic immobility” response (Marx, Forsyth, Gallup, Fusé, & Lexington, 2008), which may reflect true experiences of women, especially child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors, who freeze out of fear and/or dissociative reactions when attacked. Unfortunately, this construct has limitations and possible pitfalls, such as reinforcing victim blame (see Zoellner, 2008). Such cases also do not mean we cannot or should not help women to learn to resist actively, although it may be more difficult, as CSA is related to immobility or passivity (Gidycz, Van Wynsberghe, & Edwards, 2008; Stoner et al., 2007) and lack of assertiveness (Gidycz et al., 2008; Norris et al., 1996) during later adult assault. Given their overrepresentation in self-defense classes, Brecklin (2008) argues that we need specialized treatment and self-defense training for CSA survivors that may help reduce their risk of adult sexual revictimization (see Hill, Vernig, Lee, Brown, & Orsillo, 2011).

In recent years, I have focused more on understanding alcohol-related sexual assaults, in which resistance is much more difficult. This is a significant issue given that some studies show half of rapes involve alcohol use by victim and/or offender (Abbey, Zawacki, Buck, Clinton, & McAuslan, 2004; Ullman, 2003). The double standard of drinking and sexual behavior for men and women must change, and with it the excuses that make alcohol-related rapes more difficult for women to escape, label, and seek justice for, to say nothing of the complexities of recovering from such assaults. We may try to resist and be unable to do so, calculate we are too drunk to get away and so go along with it even though we don’t want to have sex, or pass out and be assaulted, an experience now termed incapacitated rape (Kilpatrick, Resnick, Ruggiero, Conoscenti, & McCauley, 2007). While much attention is paid to drug-facilitated rape, recent nationwide prevalence data show that it is rare compared with alcohol-related rape, most of which are accomplished when women drink voluntarily (Kilpatrick et al., 2007).

Much of the early research, including my own work, did not fully deal with alcohol-related rapes and how women resisted and avoided them. We know alcohol use is related to lowered ability to recognize risk, resist it, and avoid completed rape (Testa, Livingston, VanZile-Tamsen, & Frone, 2003). However, more is needed on women’s experience and accounts of resistance in such incidents. Obviously, self-defense or resistance training may not be adequate for women who are drinking at the time of assault, and women will continue to drink and have that right, so what is the solution? Some have argued that we must reduce women’s drinking, especially heavy drinking in risky contexts like college to reduce risk of rape (Testa & Livingston, 2009). This may reduce some women’s risk of being targeted for rape, just as resistance and self-defense training can do, but ultimately we need to prevent such rapes from occurring in the first place. Societal changes are needed to discourage men from engaging in this behavior and encourage them to get consent, especially when women are drinking. Alcohol-related rapes are virtually impossible to prosecute and are therefore effectively decriminalized. The topic of resistance is more challenging in the context of alcohol-related rapes; as researchers and educators, we must find ways to better address this issue. Currently, most rape prevention and risk reduction programs have not been evaluated separately for alcohol-related assaults and/or women who are drinking, but some research is now being directed at this high-risk group (L. Orchowski, personal communication, 2009, June).

When I started studying women’s resistance to rape, I never imagined how far the field would come in 20 years. While men continue to rape women, we will still need research on women’s resistance and validation of their experiences. More importantly, we need to ensure that women have access to resistance education and training, as well as formal self-defense training. Without such programs in their communities, women will be faced with having to resist rape without the tools to help them have a chance at escape.