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Description
The high prevalence and serious consequences associated with rape makes its prevention an important social work goal. Rape prevention necessitates understanding the attitudes and personality characteristics of actual and potential rapists. Within the research on attitudinal correlates of rape, hypermasculinity consistently emerges as one of the strongest predictors. The most commonly used measure of hypermasculinity, the Hypermasculinity Index (HMI), uses a forced-choice format that impairs its psychometric properties. This article presents the results of testing a revised version of the HMI using a phrase-completion response format. A convenience sample of undergraduate men (N = 284) from a rural New England university was used. Findings indicate that the new version yields more normally distributed data with a higher internal reliability coefficient. Even more important, the revised version greatly reduced social desirability bias and improved the ability to detect the underlying structure of hypermasculinity.
KEY WORDS: hypermasculinity; macho; phrase completion; psychometric properties; rape
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Sexual assault of adult women by men is a widespread social problem. Lifetime prevalence of sexual assault in the United States is conservatively estimated between 12.65% (Kilpatrick, Acierno, Resnick, Saunders, & Best, 1997; Resnick, Kilpatrick, Dansky, Saunders, & Best, 1993) and 14.8% of women (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). Somewhat older and less conservative estimates of lifetime prevalence rates range from approximately one in four (Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987) to one in two (Randall & Haskell, 1995) adult women in the United States.
Recent estimates of the annual incidence of rape within the United States range from 95,136 (64.8 per 100,000 women; Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], 2002) to 126,500 (103 per 100,000 women; Catalano, 2004). On college campuses there is an average of 35 attempted or completed incidents of sexual assault per 1,000 college women each academic year (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000). Although the exact number of sexual assaults is unknown as a result of underreporting (Banyard et al., 2005), even these conservative estimates of the prevalence and incidence of sexual assault indicate that it is a widespread social problem. There is evidence that both men and women are capable of being sexually aggressive; however, this article examines only sexual assault of women by men because this focus "reflects the reality that men are responsible for the vast majority of sexual assaults" (Krahe, Waizenhofer, & Moller, 2003, p. 219).
In addition to being widespread, sexual assault also produces serious short- and long-term consequences for the victim (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1974). These consequences include increased anxiety symptoms (Burgess & Holmstrom; Calhoun & Atkinson, 1991), including posttraumatric stress disorder (PTSD) (Calhoun & Resnick, 1993), clinically significant depression (Calhoun & Atkinson; Saunders, Villeponteaus, Lipovsky, Kilpatrick, & Veronen, 1992), sexual issues, and health problems (Calhoun & Atkinson). In addition to these largely individual problems, sexual assault by men can often result in the dissolution of long-term relationships and marriages (Davis, Taylor, & Bench, 1995; Monnier, Resnick, Kilpatrick, & Seals, 2002; Rodkin, Hunt, & Cowan, 1982) as well as lost work and educational productivity, all of which contribute to lowered economic status for rape victims and their children (Calhoun & Atkinson; Monnier et al.).
PREDICTING MALE OFFENDERS
Given the scope and seriousness of sexual assault by men, the need for sexual assault prevention is obvious and fits well within the purposes of social work (Council on Social Work Education, 2001). However, to prevent rape it is important to improve the ability to predict which men, as a group, are most likely to assault women. This ability would better facilitate targeted education, intervention, and prevention resources for high-risk groups. Predictive ability, however, depends on a detailed understanding of the causes and correlates of sexual assault behavior in men. The literature regarding this important topic is growing (for example, Abbey, McAuslan, Zawacki, Clinton, & Buck, 2001; Aberle & Littlefield, 2001; Koss & Gaines, 1993; Loh, Gidycz, Lobo, & Luthra, 2005), but questions remain regarding what attitudes, beliefs, personality characteristics, and environmental factors are related to an increased likelihood of perpetrating rape. A measure that can reliably detect such tendencies would greatly enhance the ability to intervene and alter such behavior among groups identified as being at high risk.
The relationship between rape perpetration and attitudes such as endorsement of rape myths and stereotypical sex roles has been studied extensively beginning with Burt's (1980) landmark study. These attitudes are weakly correlated (at approximately the r = .22 level) with self-reported sexually coercive behavior in men (for a review of the literature see Check & Malamuth, 1985) or with intentions to commit sexual assault (Douglass, 2003). A meta-analysis of the literature on attitudinal predictors of assault behavior (Murnen & Byrne, 1991), found that the strongest predictor of sexual assault behavior (r = .29) was a measure of hypermasculinity, specifically, the Hypermasculinity Index (HMI) (Mosher & Sirkin, 1984). And, in a retrospective study, hypermasculinity was moderately correlated (r = .40) with the self-reported use of force to obtain sex (Mosher & Anderson, 1986). Therefore it appears that measures of hypermasculinity are particularly important.
Overview of the HMI
Theoretically, hypermasculinity results from gender role socialization (Crowell & Burgess, 1996) in which cultural expectations of maleness produce both a turning away from relational ways of being (Bergman, 1991) and also an adversarial relationship with females who are viewed as deficient, "other," and "dangerous" (Gilligan, 1982). Consequently, hypermasculinity is thought to be related to violence against women through a process in which women are both desired and feared (Dutton, 1998; Gilligan). A solution to the contradictory impulses of desire and fear is to exert physical and sexual power and control over the feared object. As a result, hypermasculinity has been associated with both sexual and physical violence against women (see Moore & Stuart, 2005, for a review of masculinity and partner violence and Byers, 1996, for a review of the theoretical literature on hypermasculinity and sexual assault). Furthermore, the fear itself is thought to be involved in the construction of the hypermasculine personality, resulting in three components of the construct: (1) danger as exciting, (2) fighting (coercive control), and (3) calloused sexuality (Mosher & Sirkin, 1984).
In addition to these correlational studies, empirical support for the relationship of hypermasculinity and sexual assault has also been consistently found in studies using multiple regression or structural equation and path analysis models (Bourg, 2001; Johnson & Knight, 2000; Koralewski & Conger, 1992). In fact, Bourg found that hypermasculinity was strongly related to each of the four components of a model of sexual assault of women, concluding therefore that "hypermasculinity can be thought of as the common thread which binds together the fundamental constructs of coerciveness against women" (p. 80). The only study in which hypermasculinity was not an important factor in predicting sexual assault on women was that of Loh and colleagues (2005), which used a different measure of hypermasculinity, the Hypergender Ideology Scale (Hamburger, Hogben, McGowan, & Dawson,... |
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