“Fresh” Thoughts on Studying Sexual Assault

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists used to talk about having a “click” moment when they realized that some personal experience had political implications—thus the slogan, “The personal is political.” When I started graduate school in the late 1970s, I was drawn to studying sexual assault. I had been a declared feminist since high school as the Women’s Movement even reached the coal region of eastern Pennsylvania! Attending college in New York City, with its myriad opportunities for more exposure to what feminists were up to, made me increasingly aware that violence against women was a greater problem than had been acknowledged up to that point. In light of all the studies that have been conducted since, it is amazing to think how little systematic research existed back then. Under my advisor’s guidance, I started to read everything I could find, a lot of which consisted of Freudian treatises on women’s desire to be raped. But what had the greatest impact on me (besides Susan Brownmiller’s, 1976, classic, Against Our Will) were books containing personal testimonials of women’s rape experiences. In the middle of reading one of these, I had my own “click” moment. Quite suddenly and startlingly, I found myself reliving an encounter from my early teenage years. A boy whom I knew quite well, having attended elementary school with him, offered to walk me home from a dance one summer night. Being well socialized into fearing strangers jumping out of bushes, I gladly went along, especially since said boy was a football player who could undoubtedly protect me from any nasty bush-hiding monsters. Said boy had also been drinking with friends before the dance. At this point I hardly need to finish the story, except for one detail. My mother had briefly mentioned at one point that I should always carry a hat pin with me in case some boy ever got “fresh.” Frankly, I was not really sure what that meant, but I learned pretty quickly that night that “fresh” could mean “attempted rape,” and said boy learned what kind of damage a hat pin could do. Having that “aha” experience in graduate school set the stage for a lot of the research I have undertaken since then, particularly related to alcohol and sexual assault and women’s sexual assault resistance. In this article, I will discuss how my own work in these areas developed with reference to two highly cited papers published in Psychology of Women Quarterly (Norris & Cubbins, 1992; Norris, Nurius, & Dimeff, 1996) as well as my other research, how my work fits into the general body of current research on these topics, and where we might go from here. Please find the original articles at http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/16/2/179 and http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/20/1/123. In particular, I would like to address three dilemmas that feminist researchers face in addressing these topics. These dilemmas focus on three areas: (a) what my colleagues and I termed the “cognitive tightrope” (Norris et al., 1996), (b) contradictory messages that women receive about drinking, and (c) how to avoid victim blaming but still empower women to assertively resist sexual assault.