Tactics of Sexual Coercion: When Men and Women Won't Take No for an Answer‪.‬

THE PREVALENCE OF SEXUAL COERCION Sexually coercive behavior, defined in this paper as the act of using pressure, alcohol or drugs, or force to have sexual contact with someone against his or her will, has been studied among young adult populations for decades. From 1950 through the 1980s, the research focused on female victims and male perpetrators. One of the most influential studies was by Koss, Gidycz, and Wisniewski (1987), who found that 15% of the women in a national sample of over 6,000 college students had experienced rape. About 4% of the men indicated that they had perpetrated rape. In this survey, like many others conducted during this time period, only women were asked about being victims, and only men were asked about being perpetrators of coercive sexual behavior (Allgeier, 2002; Struckman-Johnson & Anderson, 1998).