Sexual Threat Research Articles

Discourses of Hate

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the global North has seen a drastic increase in usage of platform apps’ services. Platforms such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Deliveroo have become staples that connect consumers directly to workers on standby, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice to rideshare or deliver food orders. These companies offer low barriers of entry and flexible work hours, which is the ideal situation for many migrants looking for work. The scope of this research aims to build an understanding of the intersection between the rise of the far-right and the anti-immigration rhetoric in Canada and the EU that influences the hate faced by racialized migrants working highly visible gig jobs in the platform economy. By examining academic articles, news reports, and social media communications of far-right groups a major theme is apparent. The online rhetoric of the far-right can be categorized through its usage of fear and hate against racialized migrants. Migrants have been depicted as sexual threats to women, economic threats to workers, and an overall threat to the white population through demographic replacement. This conspiracy theory, known as the ‘Great Replacement’, found its way into the discursive attempts of far-right groups and political parties (ex. Chega - Portugal; VOX - Spain) to promote anti-immigration and violence against migrants. The threat that this rhetoric poses to racialized migrant workers has yet to be fully explored, and despite passing mention in a few academic articles, the violence faced by workers in the platform economy is not common in the literature, even more so in regards to its intersection with race based hate. This gap brings further questions concerning alliances among workers, advocacy groups, and trade unions based along the lines of ethnic, racial, and gendered differences to combat the growth of support for the far-right. With reasonable speculation, this research contends that far-right rhetoric and violence will continue to be targeted at racialized migrants in visible spaces and jobs, such as those in the gig economy which requires further labour solidarity and activism to aid migrants in vulnerable situations.

The Gendered Political Consequences of Racialized Sexual Threats

Narratives of racialized sexual violence—specifically, where a dominant-group woman faces harm by a man outside the dominant group—have long been a staple of American political communication. Past scholarship has examined how these threats prime racial resentment among White Americans; less is known about their gendered effects. I present an original survey experiment comparing racialized sexual threats with racialized threats that are not gendered or sexual. Both evoke racial resentment. Compared with solely racial threats, however, racialized sexual threats also make benevolent sexism salient for a range of democratic outcomes. Moreover, I find distinct effects by respondent race and gender, as men and women of different racial identities are situated differently vis a vis racialized sexual threats. To demonstrate that the gendered/sexualized impact of these appeals extends to real-world campaigns, I conclude with an analysis of candidate support in the 1988 presidential election. The 1988 race saw one of the most notorious examples of racialized sexual threat in modern American politics in the “Willie Horton” ad, aired on behalf of the Bush campaign. Even with the limited measures available in that year, I find that sexism played an important role in shaping Americans’ political views.

The Porous Boundaries of the Zohar in the Age of Print: A Zoharic Homily on the Sinew of the Thigh as a Signifier of Sexual Threat

Abstract: This microtextual analysis of a Zoharic textual unit sheds light on the boundaries and ideologies that guided the editors as they prepared the first print edition of the Zohar (Mantua, 1558), revealing how they adapted and interpolated an external commentary by Joseph of Hamadan, a thirteenth-century Castilian kabbalist. Furthermore, examining the adaptation of this same passage by a fourteenth-century Italian kabbalist, Menaḥem Recanati, provides insights into an important stage in the canonization of the Zohar. This fascinating case study not only contributes to the textual criticism of the Zohar but also brings to the fore the construction of improper sexuality as the most dangerous threat to the male Jew.

Amplifying Voices of Resilience: A Review of Women Rising

This research article reviews the book Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring, edited by Rita Stephan and Mounira M. Charrad. The primary objective of this article is to critically examine the book, assessing its merits and demerits. Comprising forty chapters authored by diverse contributors, the book employs interviews, translated essays, visual representations, and excerpts from participatory journals to amplify the courageous voices of women across borders and throughout history. The central focus is on the agency of women in the context of the Arab Spring, emphasizing themes of resistance, revolution, and reform, while also highlighting the challenges they face, including sexual threats, body shaming, and attempts to discredit their work. Notable figures discussed include Afrah Nasser, Tawakkol Karman, and others. The book also examines significant movements and gender-based laws and policies in these regions. It employs captivating language and supports its arguments with data and citations, maintaining a page-turning pace through its diverse authorship. Women Rising explores patriarchal constructs, classism, and the role of women as active agents of change, making it a relevant and contemporary resource.

Male nurse practice in inpatient rehabilitation. Finding a safe way: a grounded theory

BackgroundResearch interest in nursing's contribution to inpatient rehabilitation is growing. Nurses contribute to rehabilitation specifically by teaching patients how to care for themselves. This contribution is largely reported from a female or genderneutral perspective. Despite the work of male nurses being examined in a range of other specialities, their work within inpatient rehabilitation remains underexplored. ObjectiveTo report on a grounded theory study to identify and make visible male nurse practice in inpatient rehabilitation in Australia. DesignConstructivist grounded theory informed by symbolic interactionism. Setting(s)Stage 1 data were collected in locations of participants choosing throughout Australia. Stage 2 data collection centred on seven data collection sites across two specialist rehabilitation hospitals in two states of Australia. ParticipantsTwenty-three male nurses and 15 patients participated in the study. MethodsStage 1 (October 2013 to June 2014) consisted of semi-structured interviews with 11 male nurses. Stage 2 (February to April 2015) consisted of semi-structured interviews and 63.5 h of non-participant observation with 12 male nurses. Fifteen interviews with patients as recipients of male nurse care were also conducted. Data analysis included initial coding, focused coding, and theoretical coding using constant comparative methods, memo writing and diagramming. ResultsNurse participants were aware of patient perceptions about nursing being an occupation for women and male nurses being perceived as sexual threats, which led to an everyday concern of potential for misinterpretation. To address this concern, male nurses engaged in a three-phase process known as assessing and managing risk in order to minimise risk and to keep themselves safe in practice. However, two contextual conditions, type of care and urgency of care, influenced engagement in assessing and managing risk. The core category and substantive grounded theory to explain these results is finding a safe way. ConclusionsGender stereotypes affected the daily working lives of male nurses in inpatient rehabilitation. To counter the risk of misinterpretation male nurses used a range of strategies to address the barriers encountered daily in their working lives.However, male nurse efforts were often influenced by conditions outside of their control. In inpatient rehabilitation, male nurses practised cautiously to keep themselves safe in order to practise nursing.

Intrasexual Competition in Women’s Likelihood of Self-Enhancement and Perceptions of Breast Morphology: A Hispanic Sample

Women’s breasts are considered sexually attractive because they may infer a woman’s residual reproductive value. Given that men find women’s breasts attractive, women may compete with other women to enhance their physical attractiveness when primed with an intrasexual competitive cue. The current study investigated women’s intrasexual competition when viewing variations in breast morphology. Women (N = 189) were randomly assigned to a partner threat condition and shown images of women’s breasts that included variations in breast size, ptosis (i.e., sagginess), and intermammary distance (i.e., cleavage). Women were more likely to report an increase in enhancing their appearance, wearing revealing clothing, dieting and exercising, and perceiving the breasts as a sexual threat as a function of larger breast sizes with low ptosis and intermediate distances. The partner threat prime did not play a role in ratings. Interestingly, there was a moderating role for women’s dispositional levels in intrasexual competition. Women with higher levels of intrasexual competition were more likely to enhance their appearance when viewing large breast sizes. The study points to the role that breast morphology indicative of residual reproductive value has on increasing enhancement strategies.

Policing Commercial Sex in 1970s France: Regulating the Racialized Sexual Order

Based on multi-sited archival research, this article examines the racialized regulation of commercial sex in 1970s France, and whether and how this was intertwined with the protection of a racialized, gendered, and class-based sexual order. In doing so, this article contributes to a contextualized and historicized analysis of the construction of race and colour-blindness in French legislation and law enforcement. During and after the Algerian War, colonial anxieties about sexual threats posed by North African male labour migrants in the French metropole played a role in the discussion on commercial sex and motivated politicians, policymakers and journalists to argue for its selective tolerance. The author argues that the indirect legislation on commercial sex granted discretionary power to the police to protect the sexual order through colourblind justifications. This enabled law enforcement to implement and enforce universalist legislation ‘from below’ in a racially particularistic way.

Overcoming the Challenges of Masturbation among Students of Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria through Sex Education and Educational Leadership

Masturbation is assuming an exponential increase in proportion among students of tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The challenges of masturbation appear to be the most important and commonest sexual threat among students today. Sex education and educational leadership remain veritable interventionist approach to dealing with the challenges of masturbation among students. Unfortunately, sex education in this part of the world is uncoordinated or worse still, neglected while educational leadership seems to be a fantasy that ends in the classroom. This study examines the challenges of masturbation prevalent in tertiary institutions among students and thus, identifies the strategies of social intervention through sex education and educational leadership.

“Systemic, Transhistoric, Institutionalized, and Legitimized Antipathy”: Epistemic and Sexual Violence inA Girl Is a Half-formed ThingandMilkman

AbstractThis article concerns the interrelations of epistemic and physical gendered violence in two award-winning contemporary Irish novels, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and Milkman (2018) by Eimear McBride and Anna Burns, respectively. It argues that patriarchal naming power which defines women as sexual objects is inextricable from the physical violence featured in both texts. Using theories of violence and naming, it examines how, faced with a climate of constant and submerged sexual threat, “middle sister” (as the narrator is called) and “Girl” (the protagonist of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing) attempt to appropriate dominant patriarchal narratives to retain subjectivity in the face of violence. While “middle sister” comes to recognize and articulate the violence done to her, Girl’s internalization of violence leads to the annihilation of both self and body.

A series of 8 cases of sleep-related psychogenic dissociative disorders and proposed updated diagnostic criteria.

To identify the most relevant clinical and video-polysomnographic characteristics of patients with sleep-related dissociative disorders (SRDDs) and to propose a framework for new diagnostic criteria. We searched potential SRDD cases from the scientific literature and from a database of patients referred for clinical and video-polysomnographic assessment in a single sleep disorders center for disruptive nocturnal behaviors (n = 731). The most relevant clinical and neurophysiological characteristics of the cases were extracted and a descriptive analysis was performed. Twenty-six SRDD cases (8 new and 18 previously published cases) were reviewed. Almost all cases of SRDDs occurred in a context of past traumatic events or abuse and were associated with at least 1 comorbid psychiatric disorder. We highlighted 4 relevant clinical characteristics of SRDD useful for the differential diagnosis with parasomnias: episodes of long duration of more than 1 hour (90.9%), self-inflicted injuries (83.3%), occurrence while awake close to bedtime (35.7%), and the presence of daytime dissociative symptoms (72.7%). The video-polysomnography documented typical episodes of SRDD with prolonged wakefulness before, during, and after the event in 11/26 cases. New diagnostic criteria for SRDD were proposed, with 3 levels of certainty for the diagnosis based on clinical, video-polysomnographic, and homemade video findings. More than 30 years after its formal identification, SRDD is not currently recognized as an official diagnostic entity. We better delineate the clinical and neurophysiological features of SRDD and propose a framework for its reinstatement in the next revisions of the sleep and psychiatric disorders classifications. Lopez R, Lefevre L, Barateau L, Micoulaud-Franchi J-A, Dauvilliers Y, Schenck CH. A series of 8 cases of sleep-related psychogenic dissociative disorders and proposed updated diagnostic criteria. J Clin Sleep Med. 2022;18(2):563-573.

Electrodermal fear conditioning and sexual victimization in college students

Little research on sexual victimization has explored factors, particularly biopsychological factors that impede a person's ability to respond to risk or fear. According to Read-React-Respond model, effectively responding to a sexual threat involves a person accurately recognizing risk cues, prioritizing self-preservation, and reacting to this threat, and we propose that fear conditioning is relevant for one to effectively respond to a sexual threat with its role in avoidance behavior. This study tests whether electrodermal fear conditioning is associated with sexual victimization. The sample comprised 43 female college students, and 44% self-reported at least one sexual victimization experience. Skin conductance was recorded during a fear-conditioning task. The victims had a weaker fear conditioning skin conductance response (SCR) than the nonvictim group. Furthermore, the victims showed a larger SCR to the tone previously signifying no aversive events than the tone previously signifying aversive events during extinction. This is the first study documenting an association between sexual victimization and reduced electrodermal fear conditioning. Findings highlight the importance of the biopsychological factors in sexual victimization and lend support to the Read-React-Respond model. The findings of poor electrodermal fear conditioning among victims should be taken into consideration in preventive efforts. Our findings also have important implications for exposure-based therapy.

Images of Chinese American women on Screen: Femme Fatale and Chinese Swordswoman as the Oriental drug for Western viewers

Representation in the U.S. film industry since the early twentieth century has invariably presented Asian women as sexualized and vampish. The figure of the Asian American femme fatale signifies a particular deathly seduction. She attracts with her soft, unthreatening and servile femininity while concealing her hard, dangerous, and domineering nature. Early images, particularly the performances of Anna May Wong, continue to this day to haunt the production and reception of Asian women on screens, such as in the star-making roles of Nancy Kwan in the 1960s and Lucy Liu in the present. If Asian/ American women’s subjection is fundamentally dependent on sex, creating the parameters for Asian women’s presences in popular film and in history, racialized sexuality on screen must then be sites where bondage of representation is itself re-imagined, recast and criticized at the very moment of performance… This gender imbalance not only sustains the construction of Asian American women as more desirable candidates to be assimilated when paired with White men but also reinforces the “ownership” of White American males over the bodies and spirits of Asian/American women by negating the potential physical and sexual threat imposed by Asian/American men…

Potential for misinterpretation: An everyday problem male nurses encounter in inpatient rehabilitation.

This study aims to report on the everyday concern of the 'potential for misinterpretation', which was the basic social problem revealed in a grounded theory study exploring male nurse practice in inpatient rehabilitation in Australia. Male nurses account for approximately 10% of nursing workforce across western countries and they practice in a range of clinical areas; however, how they practice in inpatient rehabilitation remains unexplored. Constructivist grounded theory was used in this study and was conducted in two phases: (i) involved semi-structured interviews with 11 male nurses from October 2013 to June 2014 and (ii) observation of practice of 12 male nurses and semi-structured interviews with male nurses and 15 patients from February to April 2015. Nurse participants encountered the intersection of two pervasive patient ideologies about male nurses. Patients perceived nursing to be women's work and that male nurses are sexual threats. These two intersecting ideologies created a concern for male nurses working in inpatient rehabilitation and that concern was labelled 'potential for misinterpretation'. Gender stereotypes impacted on the ability of male nurses to practise nursing in inpatient rehabilitation. Male nurses were mindful on a daily basis that misinterpretation could, and did, happen in inpatient rehabilitation.

Animosity towards Women in Eudora Welty's Literary Canon

The paper investigates Eudora Welty’s concept of animosity towards women in her fiction. Her novels and short stories portray rape, sexual exhibitionism, sexual threats and brutality as inhuman experiences that sarcastically result in a vicious conversion of indignity and humiliation to the female sufferer instead of the male perpetrators. Welty suggests that this context creates a sense of intolerance which acts as a destroyer of women’s identity and sense of self. In this paper, the researchers attempt to reveal the mechanisms that subvert women’s sense of identity in a world usually controlled by men. Welty’s vision, in this sense, is that the social consciousness of the woman does not only evolve from the personal consciousness, but also intricately interacts with it. Welty’s works that are central to this study include Delta Wedding, The Robber Bridegroom, and the short fiction, including The Whole World Knows and Sir Rabbit..

Gertrude Bonnin on Sexual Morality

This paper examines attitudes to sexual morality held by the Yankton Dakota author and activist Gertrude Bonnin (1876–1938), better known by her penname Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird in Lakota). Bonnin’s concerns encompass several themes: the victimization of Indian women, disintegration of Native courtship rituals, sexual threats posed by peyote use, and the predatory nature of Euro-American men. This critique as a whole — in which a ‘white invasion,’ in her words, leads to a corruption of Native sexuality — sometimes produces inconsistencies, particularly regarding Bonnin’s statements on the alleged sexual perils of peyote. Her investigations into the Oklahoma guardianship scandals of the 1920s, however, strongly buttress recent research by Sarah Deer (2015), whose study, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, highlights the tragic aspects of Native-white sexual relations under United States settler-colonialism.

Who’s to Fear? Implicit Sexual Threat Pre and Post the “Refugee Crisis”

ABSTRACT The perceived sexual threat of ethnic outgroups has been argued to contribute to anti-immigrant attitudes within societies. The current study investigates to what extent news media might contribute to such negative outgroup perceptions by analyzing implicit sexual threat associations in Dutch news. The study draws on a sample of more than two million news articles published between 2008 and 2018 in five major Dutch newspapers. To identify implicit bias in this corpus, we use word embeddings—an advanced language modeling technique in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The results show that ethnic outgroups (i.e., nationalities that were most prominently represented among asylum applications in the Netherlands during the refugee crisis) are associated more strongly with sexual threat than ethnic ingroups. These findings proved robust across a diverse set of outgroups and ingroup nationalities and names, and point to the existence of considerable implicit bias in the coverage of ethnic minorities. Moreover, the sexual threat associated with Arabic names has grown stronger since the “refugee crisis”. Such implicit biases reflect and potentially reinforces individuals’ implicit associations between ethnic minorities and sexual threat, potentially explaining growing anti-immigration attitudes, especially since the refugee crisis.

Profiling Children Sexual Abuse in a Sample of University Students: A Study on Characteristic of Victims, Abusers, and Abuse Episodes.

Because of its prevalence and its potential negative consequences, child sexual abuse (CSA) is a public health problem in every country in the world. Knowledge of the characteristics of abuse episodes (victim, abuser, relationship between them, type of sexual contact, duration, threat and/or use of force) is essential to specify the contents of intervention programs for the detection and reduction of the negative consequences of CSA. Starting with an initial sample of 1605 university students of both sexes (70.9% women, 29.1% men), aged between 18 and 26 years (M = 21.1, SD = 2.2), 90 participants who had suffered an episode of CSA up to age 16 were selected (84.4% women, 15.6% men; Mage = 21.1, SD = 2.2). It was found that: (1) there was a higher prevalence of CSA among women and that the victims’ average age when they suffered abuse was around 11 years; (2) the abusers were mostly male, close to the victims, and with an average of slightly less than 30 years; and (3) there was a significant proportion (25.6%) of CSA cases with penetration and in which force was used or threatened. These results are relevant, as they show that there is still a noteworthy prevalence of CSA cases on university campuses that needs to be addressed. Knowing the characteristics of these episodes is critical to implementing more effective interventions.

Do women perceive sex robots as threatening? The role of political views and presenting the robot as a female-vs male-friendly product

The development of sex robots has sparked numerous debates on the consequences of their use in terms of human-technology relations, interpersonal relationships and changes in social norms. Ethical concerns about the potential negative influence of sex robots on women's situation in society are reinforced by the market as most sex robots are still intended for male customers. The main aim of two experimental studies was to examine whether sex robots are perceived by heterosexual women as a sexual threat and whether this potential threat could be decreased by depicting the robots as products suitable for women. We also examined whether the perception of robots as a threat is related to conservative and liberal political views. The results show that, after the presentation of a sex robot as a product suitable for women, the sense of sexual threat was lower than when a sex robot was presented as designed for men but only among participants with more liberal views. More conservative women perceived sex robots as a threat regardless of whether they are designed for women or men. Thus, incorporating political views can be crucial in examining the social perception of new and controversial technologies, such as sex robots.

Talk to me: towards a politics of transnational feminist solidarity

The 2012 gangrape of a young woman in Delhi, known as the Nirbhaya case, became an international media event that cast public spaces in India as unsafe, and situated sexual violence as a problem characterized by class difference and lack of development. This dominant media discourse reiterated long-standing neocolonial, classist and casteist tropes that signified a failure of transnational solidarity. At this time, Talk to Me, a public art intervention by the Bangalore-based feminist artist collective, Blank Noise, went viral on social media. The project took place near the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology on a lane along which many women experience molestation and harassment. Students from Srishti engaged strangers – typically migrant and displaced men from the lower classes – in a conversation over tea and a snack. In this article, I analyse Talk to Me as an intervention that offered a counternarrative and countervisual to the dominant, fear-based characterization of public spaces in India. Talk to Me encouraged participants, through a process of dialogue and conversation, to identify and overcome their internalized biases about the lower-class, migrant men who are often constructed as sexual threats to upper-class women. These conversations, I argue, were designed to break down ingrained biases and internalized prejudice, and to attempt to create compassion and solidarity across the barriers of class, education, language, and gender. The intervention offers a model of building solidarity that is not passive or automatic, but rather requires the difficult and often uncomfortable labour of self-reflection and introspection.

Where The Trans Men and Enbies At?: Cissexism, Sexual Threat, and the Study of Sex Work

AbstractIn this article, I examine the existing research on transgender sex workers and explore how cissexism and sexism overlap and shape this work. Overall, researchers assume that all trans sex workers are women, and all male sex workers are assumed to be cisgender. Transmasculine and other gender non‐conforming sex workers are absent from studies of sex work. Researchers in public health and criminology dominate the literature and this research is limited because it focuses only on trans women and because it focuses primarily on disease and trauma, and almost exclusively on HIV. The literature I examined treats transgender women as a public health “problem” to be solved, rather than addressing their experiences and needs as workers and as people in our society. I argue that in order to have useful applied and policy implications aimed at harm reduction, researchers must use a sociological lens to document what structural conditions push and pull people of various genders into sex markets in the first place. Finally, I advocate for the use of queer, intersectional, and transnational frameworks in future lines of inquiries as a way to push the sociological and public health literature on sex work forward in a way that will benefit all sex workers, their advocates, and service providers.