https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6140-3917
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ABSTRACT
Objective: Despite growing interest in female sexual offending, academic understanding of community females who display a propensity towards sexual aggression (PSA) is lacking. Method: Across three vignette studies, we recruited three independent samples of community females (Noverall = 555) to assess the prevalence of female PSA towards males. We also examined whether established risk factors associated with male PSA are valid predictors of female PSA. These included ambivalent sexist attitudes, inappropriate sexual interests, non-sexual aggression, impulsivity, male rape myth acceptance, and sexual preoccupation. Results: Across studies, findings showed that between 26.9% and 44.0% of participants did not emphatically reject an interest in adult male-directed PSA. Key predictors of participants’ non-zero endorsement included an interest in violent sexual activities, rape myth acceptance, and sexual preoccupation. Conclusions: Though lower than their male counterparts (see Bohner, G., Reinhard, M. A., Rutz, S., Sturm, S., Kerschbaum, B., & Effler, D. (1998). Rape myths as neutralizing cognitions: Evidence for a causal impact of anti-victim attitudes on men’s self-reported likelihood of raping. European Journal of Social Psychology, 28(2), 257–268), some community females self-report an interest in perpetrating male-directed sexual aggression. We discuss the implications of our findings on harm prevention efforts with females, alongside avenues for future research.
Open Scholarship
This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/94z5s/.
Acknowledgements
We thank the two anonymous reviewers and Co-Editor for their feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data used in our studies are publicly available on the Open Science Framework at the following link: https://osf.io/94z5s/.
Notes
1 Due to a technical fault with the survey hosting site, randomisation of presentation order was not equal. However, given that our replication studies generated similar results, we are confident that our findings were not negatively affected by this issue.
2 We used this less conservative cut-off (versus the typical p < .05) for initial model building due to the novelty of our research studies and to ensure that no potential predictive factors were overlooked.