Rape Prevention

Abstract

There are many things that can be done by individual women, or by society as a whole, to reduce the threat of sexual assault. In a review of the professional literature, we found 408 different strategies; a series of questionnaire studies with varied groups of respondents added another 732. A unifying typology was developed to organize this unwieldy collection. It distinguishes (a) whether the action is undertaken by an individual or by society; (b) whether it is aimed at preventing rape assaults from ever beginning, at preparing for an assault, or at coping with an assault once it has commenced; (c) what its intended effect is, as a way to stop rape assaults. In this typology, strategies are all expressed in terms of a common strategy grammar: “Doing X in order to achieve effect Y (which is expected to reduce the threat of rape).” The typology can help improve the study of strategy effectiveness by ensuring the precision and comparability of strategies. It can also facilitate communicating rape prevention strategies to women by providing an easily understood and unambiguous formulation.