Many forces can drive a male college student to commit sexual assault. But one of the most important may be the company he keeps.
A number of studies, on college campuses and elsewhere, have shown that having friends who support violence against women is a big risk factor for committing sexual assault. Now prevention efforts are exploring the idea that having male friends who object to violence against women can be a powerful antidote to rape on college campuses.
"One of the things that matters most to boys and emerging adult men is the opinion of other men," says John Foubert, a researcher at Oklahoma State University who studies rape prevention among young men.
One of the most well-known studies on perpetrators of campus sexual assault is psychologistDavid Lisak's 2002 "undetected rapists" study. Because few campus rapes are ever reported, much less prosecuted, Lisak looked for sex offenders hiding in plain sight at University of Massachusetts in Boston.
He surveyed about 1,800 men, asking them a wide range of questions about their sexual experiences. To learn about sexual assault, he asked things like, "Have you ever had sex with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force?" When the results came back, he was stunned.
All told, 120 men in the sample, or about 6 percent of the total, had raped women they knew. Two-thirds of those men were serial rapists, who had done this, on average, six times. Many of the serial rapists began offending before college, back in high school.
Read more at NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/18/339593542/the-power-of-the-peer-group-in-preventing-campus-rape