The Effect of Victim Resistance on Rape Completion: A Meta-Analysis

When confronted with a sexual attacker, women are often extremely concerned with avoiding rape completion. While narrative reviews typically suggest that the victim resistance is linked to rape avoidance, much of the existing literature relies on overlapping samples from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The current meta-analysis examines whether victim resistance is related to a greater likelihood of avoiding rape completion. Results from a systematic literature search across 25 databases supplemented by a search of the gray literature resulted in 4,581 hits of which seven studies met eligibility criteria for the review. Findings suggest that women who resist their attacker are significantly more likely than nonresisters to avoid rape completion. This finding held across analyses for physical resistance, verbal resistance, or resistance of any kind. Limitations of the analysis and policy implications are discussed, with particular focus on other research findings that resistance may be linked to greater victim injury.

Assessing the Efficacy of the Protective Action–Completion Nexus for Sexual Victimizations

Research has shown that protective actions are often used by rape victims, and some actions, namely, forceful physical resistance, are more effective in preventing a completed rape than other types of actions, such as nonforceful verbal resistance. The research is less clear, however, on the extent to which women who are victims of nonrape sexual victimization use protective measures and on the effectiveness of these actions. There is also uncertainty on the nature of the relationship between different types of protective actions, contextual characteristics, and the likelihood of completion of nonrape sexual victimization incidents. To investigate these issues, we used data from a national-level study of 4,446 female college students. Our results indicate that the use of protective action varied across type of sexual victimization and that the effectiveness of these actions on reducing the risk of a completed act is differentially related to type of sexual victimization. The findings suggest the need for sexual victimization prevention and education programs to include information regarding the efficacy of protective actions in both rape and nonrape incidents.

The Context of Sexual Violence: Situational Predictors of Self-Protective Actions

While considerable research has examined the relative effectiveness of different types of self-protective actions in rape avoidance, little research has considered how the situational context of the assault affects women’s choice of self-protective strategy. Through an examination of data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, this article examines the extent to which situational factors are independently related to the use of physical resistance, verbal resistance, as well as to lack of resistance. The results of the multinominal logistic regression analysis indicate that those who used verbal self-protective action were more likely to have been attacked at night, threatened with a weapon, and to be assaulted by a prior or current romantic partner than were those who chose physical resistance. Those attacked by a current or former intimate were also more likely to employ no resistance than they were physical resistance. Victims facing a substance-using assailant, however, were more likely to enact physical self-protection than to employ no resistance.

Avoiding Rape: The Effects of Protective Actions and Situational Factors on Rape Outcome

While protective actions are consistently found to be important in rape avoidance, research is less clear on what forms of protective action are most effective. There is also little research on whether the effectiveness of particular protective actions varies depending upon the context of the assault. This study employs multivariate logistic regression to examine the situational effectiveness of physical, forceful verbal, and non-forceful verbal protective strategies using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. It is predicted that failure to use physical and forceful verbal strategies will result in increased risk of rape as situational danger increases, while non-forceful verbal resistance will become less effective in more dangerous situations. Contrary to predictions, results indicate that the effectiveness of protective actions does not vary across most situations. Instead, among women who perform self-protective actions physical resistance is generally predictive of rape avoidance, forceful verbal resistance is ineffective, and non-forceful verbal resistance is predictive of rape completion.