Research on convicted rapists
See also:
Factors increasing men's risk of committing rape
The research on convicted rapists has found several important motivational factors in the sexual aggression of males. Those motivational factors repeatedly implicated are having anger at women and having the need to control or dominate them.
[1]
Factors increasing men's risk of committing rape include alcohol and drug consumption, being more likely to consider victims responsible for their rape, being less knowledgeable about the impact of rape on victims, being impulsive and having antisocial tendencies, having an exaggerated sense of masculinity, having a low opinion on women, being a member of a criminal gang, having sexually aggressive friends, having been abused as a child and having been raised in a strongly patriarchal family.
A study by Marshall
et al. (2001) found that male rapists had less empathy toward women who had been sexually assaulted by an unknown assailant and more hostility toward women than nonsex offenders and nonoffender males/females.
[2]
Freund
et al. (1983) stated that most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex,
[3] and Marshall
et al. (1991) stated that there are no significant differences between the arousal patterns of male rapists and other males.
[4]
Some argue that the capacity or propensity to rape is
adaptive in the sense that historically, men with genes which increase their propensity to rape may have had more children, furthering the spread of those genes.