Alcohol Consumption and Women's Vulnerability to Sexual Victimization: Can Reducing Women's Drinking Prevent Rape?

Abstract

Before effective prevention interventions can be developed, it is necessary to identify the mechanisms that contribute to the targeted negative outcomes. A review of the literature on women's substance use and sexual victimization points to women's heavy episodic drinking as a proximal risk factor, particularly among college samples. At least half of sexual victimization incidents involve alcohol use and the majority of rapes of college women occur when the victim is too intoxicated to resist (“incapacitated rape”). Despite the importance of women's heavy episodic drinking as being a risk factor, existing rape prevention programs have rarely addressed women's alcohol use and have shown little success in reducing rates of sexual victimization. We argue that given the strength of the association between heavy episodic drinking and sexual victimization among young women, prevention programs targeting drinking may prove more efficacious than programs targeting sexual vulnerability. Applications of existing drinking prevention strategies to reducing women's sexual victimization are discussed.

Keywords:

• Prevention
• intervention
• human females
• college students
• rape
• acquaintance rape
• victimization
• alcohol drinking patterns
• drug usage
• risk factors

Notes

¹The reader is referred to Hills's criteria for causation which were developed in order to help assist researchers and clinicians determine if risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated. (Hill, A. B. (1965). The environment and disease: associations or causation? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 58: 295–300.).Editor's note.

²This review focuses on the sexual victimization of women by men within an alcohol consumption-related context. We acknowledge, however, that societal and cultural norms surrounding gender, sexuality, and alcohol use converge to shape individual expectations and actions within a given context. These macro level conditions perpetuate violence against women in a variety of contexts, not limited to those in which alcohol is consumed (see Anderson and Doherty, 2007 and Gavey, 2005 for a fuller discussion of these issues).