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The Rationality of Sexual Offending: Testing a Deterrence/Rational Choice Conception of Sexual Assault

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Ronet Bachman ,
Raymond Paternoster  and
Sally Ward
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Abstract

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Using a combination of hypothetical scenarios and survey-type questions, this study investigates the effect of the context of the offense, formal sanctions, informal sanctions, and moral beliefs on self-reported projections to commit sexual assault. Male college students read and responded to five scenarios each describing a hypothetical sexual assault by a male. Respondents were asked to estimate the certainty of formal and informal punishment for the scenario male, the extent to which they believed the male's actions were morally wrong, and the likelihood that they would do what the male did under the same circumstances. We found that projections to commit sexual assault were affected by two circumstances of the incident, the likelihood that the male would be formally sanctioned (dismissed from the university or arrested) and the respondent's moral beliefs. The significant deterrent effect observed for formal sanction threats was not invariant, however. The fear of formal sanctions had no effect when respondents were inhibited by their moral evaluation of the incident. The deterrent effect of formal sanction threats did not vary by the level of social censure for the scenario male's actions. The implications of these finding for previous and subsequent deterrence research are discussed.

Type
Rape and Deterrence
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , 1992 , pp. 343 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This research was supported by a Central University Research Fund Grant by the University of New Hampshire, and Dr. Bachman's work on this project was supported under a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Family Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire. The authors would like to thank Kirk Williams, Ellen Cohen, and Susan White for their assistance in the development of the methodology used here and Kimberly Keezel for her meticulous help in data preparation. We would also like to thank Daniel Nagin and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and comments. Points of view and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

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