Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Although most sexual assaults are committed by men who know their victims, few researchers have considered how characteristics of perpetrators and incidents differ depending on the victimβperpetrator relationship.
This study addresses this gap with a community sample of men who reported committing a sexually aggressive act in an audio computer-assisted self-interview. No ANOVAs revealed significant main effects of relationship type and sexual precedence associated with individual difference and incident characteristics.
These findings demonstrate the importance of developing theories and prevention programs tailored for different relationship contexts. Keywords: alcohol, relationship between victim and perpetrator, sexual assault, sexual precedence. In a nationally representative sample of female college students, Koss et al. Although most sexual assaults occur in the context of a relationship that has or has the potential to have romantic and sexual dimensions, few researchers have tried to differentiate between the characteristics of sexual assaults perpetrated in committed relationships as compared with those perpetrated in casual relationships.
Traditional dating scripts link emotional and sexual intimacy; however, casual relationships often include sexual precedence, which has been defined as having previously engaged in consensual sex Bogle, ; Stinson, Understanding the associations between relationship status and sexual assault characteristics requires consideration of the type of relationship e.
Thus, this study adds to the research literature by examining theory-driven hypotheses about the role of relationship type committed vs. The only theory we could locate that specifically addressed potential differences among perpetrators who committed sexual assault in different types of dating relationships was Shotland's , theory of date rape.
