There is no easy answer to this question. While it may be tempting to lump all rapists into one monstrous category, rapists vary just as much as ordinary men do. In fact, many of them are ordinary men.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing was one of the first people to explore the reasons behind rape. In his book Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), he assumed that rapists might be suffering from ‘a mental weakness’ to lust that causes them to lose control with women. Later Havelock Ellis believed that rape was a natural manifestation of male sexual desire, which was, by default, violent and predatory. These are the kind of notions that support rape culture at large: the onus was on women to defend themselves from dangerous men.
Finding and Categorizing Rapists
Following the surge of feminism, researchers began to delve into the reasons behind rape in the late seventies. These early studies used prisoners as samples, which meant that their results were skewed: the vast majority of rapists were never jailed. Subsequently, in the 1980s, researchers now targeted ‘undetected’ rapists: men who hadn’t been arrested or reported for rape. This revealed a new dimension: 10 different studies between 1985 and 1998 revealed that around 6–14.9% of male college students in the US admitted to rape or attempted rape. Around half of this figure also admitted to multiple instances of rape. They were interviewed using questionnaires that used phrasing such ‘as without consent’ to talk about the subject, because past experience had suggested that while people may agree to having non consensual sex, they vehemently deny rape.
These studies revealed some common-sense characteristics about rapists: they were less empathetic, more narcissistic and more hostile towards women.
Men who rape tend to start young, in high school or early in college, and they tend to rape people they know. Of these men, there are two types: those who stop after one or two offenses, and those who maintain this behavior, often with greater aggression. Researchers have also come up with other ways of categorizing rapists. One of these, developed by Dr. Robert Prentky, a professor at Boston University Medical School, divides rapists into four types.
There’s the ‘opportunist’ who rapes impulsively, without premeditation. 23% of convicted rapists fall into this category, which is most emblematic of date rapists. Men who try to act out sexual fantasies, on the other hand, are driven by a conflicting narrative in which they expect women to fall in love with them after forcing them to have sex. “These men are often arrested because they try to make a date to see their victim again, and will name a time and place to meet,” Dr. Prentky said to the New York Times in 1991.
There are the ‘women haters’, who assault with the intent to humiliate women. They make up 32% of the convicted rapists sample, which needs to be taken with a grain of salt as prisoners are generally more skewed towards violence. There are the misanthropists, who are angry at men and women alike, and are looking to take out their frustration on the world at large. And lastly, there are sadists, who try to reenact their sadistic fantasies via rape. “For the sadist, the victim’s fear is a sexual stimulus,” Dr. Prentky said.
Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at the University of California, noticed during his research that repeat offenders tend to believe they have been wronged by women, telling stories of rejection in high school, with jocks being favored over them. He suggests that, as these men grow up, the prospect of having power over women- and abusing it- becomes a source of arousal.
A Public Discourse on Rape
In 2012, a Reddit thread titled ‘Reddit’s had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any redditors from the other side of the story? What were your motivations? Do you regret it?’ led to a wide variety of responses from perpetrators, victims, family members and friends. It indicates that many men who rape do not often understand what they are doing is rape. “Later, I realized the big difference between what she had offered to do and what I had tried to make her do,” one Redditor wrote in the thread. “MUCH later I realized that I had basically assaulted her, and that was why she broke up with me.”
The thread also presents a glimpse into why women often do not come forward. “He had been really drunk, I had been really drunk… so I talked to him, he apologized again, and we moved on,” a victim wrote in the thread. “I forgave him a very long time ago.”
Then there’s one of the top posts in the thread, which has long since been deleted by the moderators, with over seventy replies. The responses indicate that someone claimed to have raped 15 women over the course of three years and that now he was ‘somewhat sorry’ for his actions. “I have had very dark periods in my life to but i did not handle it by raping,” said one reply. “My God you make it sound like you are the victim in a way… it’s just disturbing… I think you should still do time for what you did it is one of the worst things a person can do.”
A Portrait of Rapists around the World
It would be fallacious to suggest that rape is equally rampant everywhere around the world. According to a study published in The Lancet, 22.7% of men in China self-identify as rapists, compared to 11.1% in Bangladesh and 15.5% in Sri Lanka. As bad as these figures are, things are much worse in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where 31.9% and 60.7% of men admit to rape. In Bangladesh, most of these men first committed rape when they were aged 15–19, whereas 60.8% of rapists in China were in the 20–29 age bracket during their first offense. In Bangladesh, 75% of rapists admitted to raping women with multiple perpetrators.
Noam Shpancer suggests that these behaviors rarely happen in a vacuum. “Men who attack women are usually following either a well-learned social script or the immediate pressure of group norms. A social script dictates that certain things lead to other things.
“…if the sexual script dictates that the endpoint of flirting and foreplay is intercourse, then many will be loath to break it regardless of how they actually feel in the moment, and those who say, “Stop!” mid-script will be seen as offenders, deserving of retaliation or punishment.”
Like the other encompassing issues of our age, rape is endemic and affects all levels of society. While top-down efforts to address rape have been underway for decades, we also need bottom-up efforts that where people act as both individuals and groups to ‘flip the script’ and create new, more appropriate social scripts. We need to re-engineer the minds of rapists to stop their actions in their tracks, and we need to create a global conversation on how to do that. It’s difficult right now to imagine a world where women can feel as safe as men do while walking on streets, but the onus is on us to pave the way towards such a world.