Explicating alcohol's role in acquaintance sexual assault: complementary perspectives and convergent findings.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a symposium presented at the 2004 meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism (RSA) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. There were four presentations and a discussant. The symposium was co-chaired by Tina Zawacki and Jeanette Norris. The first presentation was made by Jeanette Norris, who found that alcohol consumption and preexisting alcohol expectancies affected women's hypothetical responses to a vignette depicting acquaintance sexual aggression. The second presentation was made by Joel Martell, who reported that alcohol-induced impairment of executive cognitive functioning mediated the effect of intoxication on men's perceptions of a sexual assault vignette. In the third presentation, Antonia Abbey found that the experiences of women whose sexual assault involved intoxication or force were more negative than were the experiences of women whose sexual assault involved verbal coercion. The fourth presentation was made by Tina Zawacki, who reported that men who perpetrated sexual assault only in adolescence differed from men who continued perpetration into adulthood in terms of their drinking patterns and attitudes toward women. William H. George discussed these findings in terms of their implications for theory development and prevention programming.

Perpetrators of Alcohol-Involved Sexual Assaults: How Do They Differ From Other Sexual Assault Perpetrators and Nonperpetrators?

Approximately 50% of sexual assaults involve alcohol. Researchers have documented situational characteristics that distinguish between sexual assaults that do and do not involve alcohol, but little attention has been paid to differences between the perpetrators of these two types of assault. In this study, discriminant function analysis was used to distinguish between college men (N = 356) who reported perpetrating sexual assault that involved alcohol, sexual assault that did not involve alcohol, or no sexual assault. Predictors of sexual assault perpetration that have been documented in past research differentiated nonperpetrators from both types of perpetrators. Perpetrators of sexual assaults that involved alcohol were in most ways similar to perpetrators of sexual assaults that did not, although they did differ on impulsivity, alcohol consumption in sexual situations, and beliefs about alcohol. These findings suggest mechanisms through which alcohol is involved in sexual assault that are relevant to theory and prevention.