The Role of Male Sexual Arousal in Rape: Six Models

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622 HOWARD E. BARBAREE AND WILLIAM L. MARSHALL determinants (Craig, 1990). Recently, it has been suggested that rape is a heterogeneous phenomenon, with different instances of the behavior requiring different explanations. Knight and Prentky (1990) have presented a psychological typology of rapists, grounded in empirical investigation, that specifies different motives underlying the behavior in different subtypes of rapists. In addition, Malamuth has presented a predictive model of sexual assault that attributes the behavior to multiple predisposing characteristics (Malamuth, 1986, 1988). There- fore, rape is being seen less and less as a unitary phenomenon. Sexual arousal in the male perpetrator is an obvious and important component in most acts of rape. Studying sexual arousal in rape directly as it occurs in the natural environment is obviously out of the question, and most of what we know of sexual arousal in rape comes from interviews with rapists and their victims. Rapists are generally regarded as poor sources of information because they tend to lie or distort information regarding the offense (Scully & Marola, 1984). There have been several approaches to dealing with this dishonesty. For example, some investigators have encouraged honesty by making special arrangements to protect the confidentiality of information (Abel et al., 1988) or the rapist's anonymity (Koss & Dinero, 1988). Other authors have written of their clinical impressions of rapists, and their descriptions of the motivation for rape have been invaluable in reaching our current understanding of rape (Groth, 1979). The social psychological approach has depended almost exclusively on self-report responses to survey questionnaires as a research methodology. The clinical approach has depended heavily on self-report, in interview and in responses to questionnaires, but this approach has also utilized laboratory assessments of sexual arousal and preferences as an important assessment measure and treatment target. Studies of sexual arousal among rapists and nonrapists in the laboratory using analog assessment techniques have been used to study the role of sexual arousal in rape, and the current article will focus on the results of these studies. Most of the studies have been done in the following way. Male subjects are recruited, either from among incarcerated or convicted rapists or from a community sample of men serving as a comparison group. The community sample is usually designated as a non- rapist sample, although a minority of these men will have quite likely engaged in some kind of sexually aggressive behavior (Koss & Dinero, 1988). In a laboratory setting, their erectile response is monitored, usually by circumferential strain gauge plethysmography, while they are presented with verbal descriptions of consenting sexual activity between adults and of rape in which a male forces intercourse on an adult woman. The present article reviews the literature concerned with sexual arousal to rape cues and describes six different models, each specifying a different relationship between the aggressive aspects of rape and the perpetrator's sexual response. We do not argue for the supremacy of any particular model. In fact, different models may be helpful in understanding the role of sexual arousal in different rapes or in the rapes of different rapists. The models are being presented in two categories. First, there are those that focus on the nature of the responses involved, and these are referred to as response control models. Second, there are those that focus on the way in which stimuli associated with rape behavior evoke sexual arousal. We refer to these as stimulus control models. There are four of these presented. Most of the models that are presented here are "trait" models in the sense that they postulate an organization of behavior in the perpetrators of rape that distinguishes them from normal men. One of the models is a "state" model in the sense that it postu- lates the potential for a transitory state that has the potential for increasing the risk of rape in normal men. The models will be presented in order of increasing complex- ity. Parsimony demands that we favor the less complex models, and it may be that some findings currently understood within the framework of a more complex model will eventually be fully explained by using a more straightforward model. A number of published articles have discussed the methodological issues relating to penile plethysmography and its use as an assessment of sexual offenders (Barbaree, 1990; Earls & Mar- shall, 1983). These articles have rightly pointed to the factors that may contribute to error variance in these measures, such as construction of the stimuli and the ability of subjects to suppress arousal or to "fake" responses. We will not attend to these issues, but rather focus on the conceptual and theoretical issues pertaining to the measurement of rape arousal. Often, methodological and conceptual issues will seem to be synonymous. For example, men may have the ability to suppress their arousal to avoid the detection of a deviant sexual interest by the assessor, and the problem of faking has been addressed as an important methodological issue (Quinsey & Chaplin, 1988). On the other hand, the first model presented here highlights men's ability to suppress as a conceptual issue, by postulating important differences among men in the ability to suppress and by postulating a relationship between this ability and the propensity to commit sexual aggression (Hall, 1989). Because of limited space, we will not be able to discuss the methodological issues in detail. Ability to Suppress Arousal Response Control Models The first model presented is one of the more recently described in the literature. Hall (1989) suggested this very simple model after presenting data collected from a large sample of incarcerated sexual offenders. Hall (1989) presented these offenders with verbal descriptions of consenting sexual interac- tions, rape, and nonsexual assault while monitoring their erectile responses in the laboratory. At the end of the session, he presented the stimulus that had evoked the greatest arousal in the session again to each subject, with instructions to inhibit their arousal as best they could. He then divided his subjects into those who were able to inhibit their arousal and those who were not. Those subjects who were not able to inhibit had shown greater arousal to stimuli depicting sexual assault in the session before being given instructions to inhibit. In an earlier study, Abel, Blanchard, and Barlow (1981) found that some rapists actually showed increases in arousal to rape cues after they had been instructed to suppress arousal. This model suggests that an explanation of sexual arousal to rape cues in the laboratory might reduce to the ability the subject shows in consciously suppressing his sexual arousal. Even though most of the subjects in the Hall (1989) study, all of whom were offenders, were able to suppress their arousal, this model
might go on to postulate that sexually aggressive men differ from nonaggressive men in that their ability to suppress sexual arousal is less than normal. This hypothesis has not been tested to any extent, but Wydra, Marshall, Earls, and Barbaree (1983) compared rapists and nonrapists in their ability to suppress arousal and found no differences. At the very least, because of the advantages of parsimony and the simplicity of Hall's model, the "ability to suppress" model will force the rest of us who opt for more complex stimulus control models to examine and eliminate the possibility that our results are not due to this straightforward ability to suppress. Response Compatibifity Blader and Marshall (1989) argue directly against the sexual preference hypothesis that posits that rapists "prefer" noncon- senting sexual activity. They argue that there is no evidence for sexual arousal to force and violence as an antecedent response to rape, as the view of rape as a paraphilia would have us believe, because the cues ofnonconsent and violence cannot stim- ulate a man to rape when they are produced by the very behavior that is in question. Furthermore, Blader and Marshall re- view the research literature and conclude that rapists are not distinguished from nonrapists by their erectile responses to sexual violence in the laboratory. Blader and Marshall (1989) point to the fact that when a man rapes, his sexual arousal accompanies his assaultive behavior. Therefore, what distinguishes rapists from nonrapists is an ability to perform the responses of hostile aggression and sexual arousal at the same time. These authors argue that, in the normal man, the two responses are mutually inhibitory: When the aggressive response has been emitted it precludes sexual arousal, and when sexually aroused, a man is incapable of an aggressive response. According to these authors, "response compatibility" of aggressive and sexual behaviors is the psychological hallmark of the rapist. This model is presented as a diagram in Figure 1. Blader and Marshall (1989) referred to an unpublished man- uscript (Blader, Marshall, & Barbaree, 1988) that described an experimental paradigm designed to study response compatibility. The paradigm involved a combination of penile plethysmography methodology to study the stimulus control of sexual arousal with analog laboratory procedures that have been used to study aggressive responses. Subjects who were being monitored for erectile responses to various sexual stimuli were made to believe that they were also delivering a noxious stimulus to another subject (actually a female confederate of the experi- menter). When subjects were required to present a noxious stimulus to a woman, sexual arousal was greatly reduced. However, when subjects were provoked to anger by the woman in a nega- tive evaluation manipulation, subject's sexual arousal was maintained while the subject presented noxious stimuli to the confederate. In this circumstance, the aggressive responding did not inhibit the sexual response, and the two responses were therefore seen to be compatible. It is too early to tell how productive this model will be in generating research ideas or how helpful it will be in terms of our understanding of sexual aggression. The results of the re- SPECIAL SECTION: MALE SEXUAL AROUSAL IN RAPE 623 S Aggression I Arousal j (') S Normal - Responses Incompatible Aggression Arousal j (0) Pathological - Responses Compatible Figure 1. The response compatibility model. search paradigm may be just as well accommodated by the stimulus disinhibition model described below. Upon some re- flection, we have come to believe the argument at the heart of the response compatibility model may be tautological. When a man rapes, by definition, he is committing an aggressive and a sexual act at the same time. The co-occurrence, and therefore the compatibility of these two responses, is the defining feature of rape behavior. Therefore, when response compatibility is used as an explanatory concept for rape, the argument these authors present reduces to the circular statement "a man rapes because he rapes:' Nevertheless, the response compatibility model and the experimental paradigm described above may ultimately lead to useful assessment methodologies and research findings. Stimulus Control Models For the purposes of this exposition, the following definitions, presented in advance, will assist in the clear articulation of the models presented. A sexual stimulus is one that has the effect of evoking sexual arousal in the average or typical male. It usually involves the description of sexual activity or the description of the physical attributes of a woman in various forms of undress. A rape stimulus is that part of the verbal description of rape that describes elements of force, violence, victim harm, pain, humiliation, or fear. Excitation is a process whereby a stimulus evokes or increases sexual arousal, and inhibition is a process whereby a stimulus reduces or limits the strength of sexual arousal to a sexual stimulus (Barbaree, 1990).
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