What Were They Thinking? College Men's Thoughts That Facilitate Sexual Coercion

Abstract

Researchers have recognized the need to increase understanding of sexually coercive college men. The current exploratory study examines sexually coercive men's written descriptions of their experience in situations when they wanted to have sex with a woman and she did not agree to it. We compared each man's descriptions of a situation involving coercion to their description of a situation in which they used less coercion, by comparison. 57 male undergraduates at a large Midwestern University participated in a self-report open-ended questionnaire. Results indicated that differences between situations existed on a variety of situational and cognitive factors. Differences suggest that men believe that their desire to obtain sexual pleasure motivated them to engage in sexual coercion.