(PS12-D76) Exploring the Structure of Impelling Risk Factors for Sexual Assault: Integration of Normal & Pathological Personality

Sexual assault (SA), which includes a range of behaviors ranging from unwanted touching to rape, is a significant public health concern that occurs across the lifespan, with numerous negative outcomes for victims, their families, and society. While individuals of any gender can both experience and perpetrate SA, this form of violence is disproportionately perpetrated by men against women. Numerous risk factors for SA have been established; however, impelling risk factors, which includes perpetrator attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, dispositions, values, stereotypes, and other intrapersonal characteristics have been found to confer significant risk for engaging in sexually aggressive behavior. Researchers have highlighted numerous impelling risk factors for SA, including rape myth acceptance, hypermasculine ideological beliefs, masculine gender role stress, token resistance to sex, and other numerous dysfunctional sexual beliefs. Despite this, these constructs are poorly defined, lack conceptual cohesion, and include a heterogeneous set of underlying factors, wherein it is possible that these constructs suffer from the “jingle” and “jangle” fallacies. In addition to impelling risk factors for SA, few studies have explored the role of normal and pathological personality in predicting SA-related outcomes, despite their usefulness in predicting other aggressive and violent behaviors. Therefore, this overarching goal of this study was to rigorously test the degree of inter-relatedness and similarities between existing measures of impelling risk factors for SA, normal personality traits, and pathological personality traits. Participants included N = 286 college men between the ages of 18 and 26 who reported past-year sexual intercourse with a female partner. Approximately 40% of men within the sample reported problematic drinking (i.e, AUDIT ≥ 8). Results indicated that 12.9% of men reported completed or attempted sexual assault since the age of 14, 26.9% reported past-year sexual-intimate partner violence with a romantic partner, 22.7% reported prior use of sexual coercion to obtain sexual activity from a partner, and 48.3% reported past-year use of coercive condom-use resistance tactics. Results from the present study will also be discussed in relation to the incremental predictive validity of including impelling risk factors for SA perpetration above and beyond both normal and pathological personality traits, as well as implications for assessment and intervention efforts.