Why rapists rape

It is necessary to first establish that rape is not a behavioral or mental disorder, but a criminal offense. Although some rapists may have a psychological disorder, there is no such disorder that compels people to rape. Evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill and evolutionary anthropologist Craig Palmer believe, in contrast to Hamby, that the primary motive behind rape is indeed sex.

They argue that rape is an adaptation — a result of Darwinian selection and are of the opinion that it evolved to increase the reproductive success of men. They point out that most victims are women of childbearing age, saying this supports their hypothesis that rape derives from a desire to reproduce. It said that the pieces of evidence cited by the authors were misleading, biased or "equally support alternative explanations.

In fact, most social scientists, psychologists and feminist activists are of the opinion that rape nearly exclusively has to do with issues of power and violence. They say that rape is not about lust but motivated by the urge to control and dominate, and that it could also be driven by hatred and hostility towards women.

Rapists often see women as sex objects who are there to fulfill men's sexual needs. They tend to hold false beliefs, often described as rape myths.

For instance, a rapist can believe that if a woman says no, she really means yes, and that she is just playing around or challenging him. Antonia Abbey, a social psychologist at Wayne State University in the US city of Detroit, wrote that one repeat assaulter believed the woman "was just being hard to get.

A man has to persist to determine if she really means it. Abbey quoted yet another repeat offender as saying: "I felt as if I had gotten something that I was entitled to, and I felt I was repaying her for sexually arousing me. Sherry Hamby told DW that in some cultures, patriarchy and dominance are expressed through a kind of "dehumanization" in which women are seen as inferior beings to men.

This makes it much easier for women to become the targets of aggression. According to Hamby, for men in such cultures, "part of their cultural training is for them to lose touch with their emotions. The link between narcissism and rape seems to be especially strong when repeat offenders are concerned. One of the key characteristics shared by rapists and narcissists is a tendency to dehumanize others.

There are several types of rapists. There is the opportunistic rapist, who seizes any chance for sexual gratification, such as the loss of self-control on the part of their victim under the influence of alcohol. The vindictive rapist has anger and aggression focused directly toward women. Such a rapist believes he is permitted to sexually attack women because he feels he has been hurt, rejected or wronged by women in the past.

Rapists often deny having raped their victims and freqently try to justify their actions. Men who admit rape often try to find excuses for what they have done.

Sexual assault is an inexcusable act of violence and a criminal offense. Unfortunately, a lot of the victims remain silent to avoid stigmatization and being blamed by society, while their rapists are free to look for another victim. This article deals with men raping adult women, not children, and not with any other form of sexual abuse. Called the notal organ, it is a clamp on the top of the male's abdomen with which he can grab on to one of the female's forewings during mating, to prevent her escape.

Besides rape, the notal organ does not appear to have any other function. For example, when the notal organs of males are experimentally covered with beeswax, to keep them from functioning, the males cannot rape. Such males still mate successfully, however, when they are allowed to present nuptial gifts to females. And other experiments have shown that the notal organ is not an adaptation for transferring sperm: in unforced mating, the organ contributes nothing to insemination.

Intriguingly, however, the males, too, seem to prefer a consensual arrangement: they rape only when they cannot obtain a nuptial gift. Experiments have shown that when male scorpionflies possessing nuptial gifts are removed from an area, giftless males--typically, the wimpier ones that had failed in male-male competitions over prey--quickly shift from attempting rape to guarding a gift that has been left untended.

That preference for consensual sex makes sense in evolutionary terms, because when females are willing, males are much more likely to achieve penetration and sperm transfer. One must therefore look to the male psyche--to a potential mental rape organ--to discover any special-purpose adaptation of the human male to rape. One way to do that is to possess traits that women prefer: men with symmetrical body features are attractive to women, presumably because such features are a sign of health.

A second way that men can gain access to women is by defeating other men in fights or other kinds of competitions--thereby gaining power, resources and social status, other qualities that women find attractive. There are several mechanisms by which such a strategy could function.

For example, men might resort to rape when they are socially disenfranchised, and thus unable to gain access to women through looks, wealth or status. Alternatively, men could have evolved to practice rape when the costs seem low--when, for instance, a woman is alone and unprotected and thus retaliation seems unlikely , or when they have physical control over a woman and so cannot be injured by her. Over evolutionary time, some men may have succeeded in passing on their genes through rape, thus perpetuating the behavior.

It is also possible, however, that rape evolved not as a reproductive strategy in itself but merely as a side effect of other adaptations, such as the strong male sex drive and the male desire to mate with a variety of women. That ability invites inquiry, according to the psychologist Margo Wilson of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and her coworkers, because it is not a trait that is common to the males of all animal species.

Its existence in human males could signal that they have evolved psychological mechanisms that specifically enable them to engage in forced copulation--in short, it could be a rape adaptation. But that is not the only plausible explanation. The psychologist Neil M. Malamuth of the University of California, Los Angeles, points out that the ability to copulate with unwilling women may be simply a by-product of men's "greater capacity for impersonal sex.

Both hypotheses are plausible: one of us Thornhill supports the former, whereas the other Palmer endorses the latter. Regardless of which hypothesis prevails, however, there is no doubt that rape has evolutionary--and thus genetic--origins.

All traits and behaviors stem from a complex interplay between genes and the environment. If rape is an adaptation, men must possess genes that exist specifically because rape increased reproductive success. If rape turns out to be merely a side effect of other adaptations, then the genes involved exist for reasons that have nothing to do with rape. Either way, however, the evolutionary perspective explains a number of otherwise puzzling facts about the persistence of rape among human males.

And, in fact, young adult women are vastly overrepresented among rape victims in the female population as a whole, and female children and post-reproductive-age women are greatly underrepresented. Once again, the evolutionary logic seems to predict reality. Rapists seldom engage in gratuitous violence; instead, they usually limit themselves to the force required to subdue or control their victims. A survey by one of us Palmer , of volunteers at rape crisis centers, found that only 15 percent of the victims whom the volunteers had encountered reported having been beaten in excess of what was needed to accomplish the rape.

And in a study of 1, rape victims, a team led by the sociologist Thomas W. McCahill found that most of the victims reported being pushed or held, but that acts of gratuitous violence, such as beating, slapping or choking, were reported in only a minority of the rapes percent or less. A very small number of rape victims are murdered: about. Even in those few cases, it may be that the murder takes place not because the rapist is motivated by a desire to kill, but because by removing the only witness to the crime he greatly increases his chance of escaping punishment.

In recent years research on human unhappiness informed by evolutionary theory has developed substantial evidence about the functional role of psychological pain.

Such pain is thought to be an adaptation that helps people guard against circumstances that reduce their reproductive success; it does so by spurring behavioral changes aimed at preventing future pain [see "What Good Is Feeling Bad? Thus one would expect the greatest psychological pain to be associated with events that lower one's reproductive success, and, indeed, emotionally traumatic events such as the death of a relative, the loss of social status, desertion by one's mate and the trauma of being raped can all be interpreted as having that effect.

For one thing, the victim may be injured. Moreover, if she becomes pregnant, she is deprived of her chance to choose the best father for her children.

A rape may also cause a woman to lose the investment of her long-term partner, because it calls into question whether the child she later bears is really his. A variety of studies have shown that both men and women care more for their genetic offspring than for stepchildren.

Thornhill, has conducted a series of studies on the factors that contribute to the emotional pain that women experience after a rape. Those studies confirmed that the more the rape interfered with the women's reproductive interests, the more pain they felt. The data, obtained from the Joseph J. Peters Institute in Philadelphia, came from interviews with girls and women who had reported a sexual assault and who were subsequently examined at Philadelphia General Hospital between and The subjects, who ranged in age from two months to eighty-eight years, were asked a variety of questions designed to evaluate their psychological responses to the rape.

Among other things, they were asked about changes in their sleeping habits, in their feelings toward known and unknown men, in their sexual relations with their partners children were not asked about sexual matters , and in their eating habits and social activities. That finding makes evolutionary sense, because it is young women who were at risk of being impregnated by an undesirable mate.

Married women, moreover, were more traumatized than unmarried women, and they were more likely to feel that their future had been harmed by the rape. That, too, makes evolutionary sense, because the doubt a rape sows about paternity can lead a long-term mate to withdraw his support. In other words, when the rapist exerted less force, the victim was more upset afterward.

Those findings, surprising at first, make sense in the evolutionary context: a victim who exhibits physical evidence that sexual access was forced may have less difficulty convincing her husband or boyfriend that what took place was rape rather than consensual sex.

In evolutionary terms, such evidence would be reassuring to a pair-bonded male, because rape is a one-time event, whereas consensual sex with other partners is likely to be frequent, and thus more threatening to paternity. Among young girls and older women, however, penile-vaginal intercourse was no more upsetting than other kinds of assaults.

Again, the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy may be a key factor in the degree of trauma the victim experiences. Through a Rapist's Eyes A group of rapists and date rapists in prison were interviewed on what they look for in a potential victim and here are some interesting facts :.

They are most likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other hairstyle that can easily be grabbed. They are also likely to go after a woman with long hair. Women with short hair are not common targets. They will look for women who's clothing is easy to remove quickly. Many of them carry scissors around specifically to cut clothing.