Abstract
The circumvention of female reproductive choice via rape is a costly and evolutionarily persistent threat to women’s reproductive fitness. This is argued to have generated selection pressure for a precautionary threat management system for rape avoidance among women. Such a system would regulate women’s fear of rape as a functional emotional response to inputs providing information about the current risk and reproductive cost of rape. Fear of rape is expected to subsequently motivate adaptive behavior to avoid threats to one’s reproductive choice. The current research tested key tenets of this proposed system and found that women report greater fear of rape as a function of characteristics that alter the likelihood of being victimized, including being younger, living in a neighborhood perceived as dangerous, living in close proximity to family, and having been the victim of a sexual assault in the past. We also discuss mixed and null results with respect to the role of relationship status and mate value. In turn, fear of rape was associated with behavior expected to reduce one’s risk of being victimized. Specifically, women who were more fearful of rape reported consuming true crime media with greater frequency and indicated that this consumption was specifically motivated by the desire to learn strategies to prevent or escape an attack. Overall, results were fairly consistent with a threat management system approach and may help to explain why fear of rape is a powerful feature of women’s psychology.
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Data Availability
The data associated with this research are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/fn3ag/.
Notes
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual coercion are operationally distinct phenomena. The evolutionary logic described here assumes that it is the threat of rape (in particular, forced penile-vaginal intercourse) that has created selection pressure for the threat management system we describe—owing to the possibility of conception. However, women are not able to perfectly predict whether sexual coercion (e.g., verbal threats) or sexual assault (e.g., forced oral penetration) will lead to rape. Consequently, we expect that a broad array of threat cues, including those associated with sexual assault and coercion, will be interpreted as potential cues to the likelihood of rape occurring.
Data on women’s conception risk was collected in both studies, but participants were not recruited to be able to test hypotheses related to conception risk (e.g., no exclusions were made on the basis of hormonal contraceptive use). This resulted in very small samples meeting criteria for assessment of conception risk. Given the high risk of error with small samples and self-report conception risk estimates (Gangestad et al., 2016), these data are not presented.
TurkPrime (now Cloud Research) provides a gender consistency score for participants that indicates, across studies the participant has completed, what proportion of reports have indicated their gender as male vs female. We excluded participants who indicated in our study that they were female, but for whom their gender consistency score indicated that they had previously reported as a male 50% of the time or more.
Cronbach’s alpha was based on mate value responses for ages 15–20 because it was completed by the largest number of participants.
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McDonald, M.M., James, R.M. & Roberto, D.P. True Crime Consumption as Defensive Vigilance: Psychological Mechanisms of a Rape Avoidance System. Arch Sex Behav 50, 2085–2108 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-01990-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-01990-1