Most American male college athletes admit to raping women: US poll
An online survey of US college students has found that the majority of American male athletes admitted to “sexually coercing” or raping a female companion.
The survey report titled "Sexual Coercion Practices Among Undergraduate Male Recreational Athletes, Intercollegiate Athletes, and Non-Athletes," followed up on another research study published in 1995, showing that male college athletes were more likely to commit sexual violence on women than their other male college peers.
Sexually coercing meets the legal definition of rape, according to the researchers who conducted the study as cited in a Friday report by the UK-based daily Independent.
“We found that 54.3 percent of the intercollegiate and recreational athletes and 37.9 percent of non-athletes had engaged in sexually coercive behaviors – almost all of which met the legal definition of rape,” said Sarah Desmarais, a psychologist at North Carolina State University and co-author of the study, as quoted in the report.
Among the “sexually coercive” behaviors, the report adds, were making a partner engage in sexual activity without protection as well as using physical force or threats to commit rape.
“Sexual assault on campuses – and in society more generally – is a serious problem that needs to be addressed,” said Desmarais.
“We wanted to look at factors that might be contributing to higher rates of sexual assault among athletes so that we could identify things that prevention programs could try to address, such as attitudes about women and beliefs about rape,” she added.
Desmarais further emphasized that the true sexual assault figures may actually be even higher, as the survey relied on men to be honest about whether they had committed rape.
“As high as these numbers are, they may actually under-represent the rates of coercion, since the study relied on self-reported behavior,” she underlined.
A total of 379 male undergraduates under the age of 23 from a public university in southeastern US participated in the online survey, 191 of which were non-athletes, 29 were intercollegiate athletes, and 159 were recreational athletes. The students anonymously responded to a variety of questions about their history of sexually inappropriate behaviors, as well as their beliefs concerning traditional gender roles and the nature of sexual assault.
The survey was originally released and published on May 30 in the journal Violence Against Women.
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