Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1727-7845

Date of Award

5-31-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Criminal Justice

First Advisor

Volkan Topalli

Second Advisor

Timothy Brezina

Third Advisor

Callie Rennison

Fourth Advisor

Richard Wright

Abstract

Feminist scholarship has traditionally led the discourse on sexual violence within criminology. In the early 21st century, Richard Felson provided the first significant opposition to hardline Feminist theory’s approach to studying all kinds of violence perpetration, including sexual violence. While the Feminists believed that the desire for males to maintain the hegemony of patriarchy led to sexual violence, Felson argued that the perpetration of sexual violence was fueled by sexual desire, not sexism. This study provides a thorough historical overview of the study of sexual violence perpetration with emphasis on the Feminist and Felsonian perspectives while identifying the evidence and gaps for each. One of Felson’s hypotheses was that the physical attractiveness of a target would lead to a consistent increased victimization risk, an assumption which Feminist scholars have rejected. I analyzed Wave IV of the public use dataset National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to directly test Felson’s hypothesis implicating attractiveness as a causal factor in sexual violence while indirectly testing the Feminist contention that sexual violence exclusively results from societally ingrained patriarchal notions of misogyny, without consideration of biological or psychosocial effects of sexuality. Specifically, I employed the Add Health’s interviewer-rated physical attractiveness item as the core variable predicting participant experiences with sexual assault. The primary outcome measures evaluated were self-reported experience with Physical Forced Sex (PFS) victimization and Coerced Sex (CS) victimization. After conducting a series of logistic regression analyses through a model-building process, it was found that being rated as physically “Very unattractive” significantly lowered a female’s risk of experiencing PFS victimization when compared to those rated as “About average.” Additionally, I found no effect of physical attractiveness for those rated as “Unattractive” or above, indicating that being physically “Very unattractive” was (statistically speaking) a protective factor, creating a kind of threshold effect for the impact of physical attractiveness on PFS victimization. Moreover, there was no effect of physical attractiveness on CS victimization. The results were then discussed alongside theoretical considerations and the framing of a potential new expanded decision-making model for understanding the motivation to perpetrate sexual violence.

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