Chad Sniffen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Our podcasts are about understanding, responding to and preventing sexual violence. My name is Chad Sniffen and I'm the host for this episode which is the first part of a multi-part series that explores the intersection of sexual violence and alcohol consumption 

[00:00:18] In this episode, you'll be hearing from Dr. Elizabeth Anderson, who is a research scientist at the International Center for Research on Women with the Global Health, Youth and Development team. You'll also be hearing from Dr. Elise Lopez, who is the Director of the University of Arizona consortium on gender-based violence. And you'll be hearing from Dr. Mary Koss. Dr. Koss is a Regent's Professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. Dr Koss conducted the first national study of sexual assault among college students in the United States, which was the basis of the book "I Never Called It Rape" which was re-released in 2019. More information about our guests along with links to their work can be found in the show notes for this podcast on our website at www.nsvrc.org forward slash podcasts.

[00:01:10] Hello, Dr. Anderson.

[00:01:11] Elizabeth Anderson: [00:01:11] Hello

[00:01:12] Hello, Dr. Lopez. 

[00:01:13] Elise Lopez: [00:01:13] Hi Chad, thanks for having me. 

[00:01:16] Chad Sniffen: [00:01:16] Hello, Dr. Koss.

[00:01:16] Mary Koss: [00:01:16] Glad to be here. 

[00:01:18] Chad Sniffen: [00:01:18] Today's podcast will be about two things. It'll be about the role that alcohol plays in rape and also about how COVID-19 changes a lot of what we already know about sexual violence.  Alcohol and sexual violence has always been a challenge for advocates on one hand, advocates don't want to excuse offender's behavior based on alcohol consumption. On the other hand, we can't ignore that there is a connection between alcohol consumption and sexual violence. So can you tell us more about what is known about the intersection of alcohol consumption and sexual violence, and we’ll start with you, Dr. Koss.

[00:01:51] Mary Koss: [00:01:51] About three out of every four rapes on a college campus involve people who've been drinking. So we'd like to take some time to talk about what is the role that alcohol plays in rape? Does it cause rape? Is it just around when rape happens? There's so many nuances that I don't want to, no one wants to get in the weeds. On the other hand, if you don't say them upfront, we could get off on the wrong foot. I'm going to give some general points that are based on research involving heterosexual men. We don't know if homosexual men may have additional considerations or some of what I'm going to say is not as relevant.

[00:02:47] And we really have poor information about whether what I have to say applies to other gender pairings. So please accept the reason for using heteronormative language and for stereotyping men as perpetrators, which frankly they, male identified people are the vast majority of perpetrators, but that does not mean that all their victims are women.

[00:03:21] And this is obviously something that future work has to approach if we're going to deliver on our promise to be inclusive in understanding and preventing sexual assault. So speaking with that caveat, Here's a couple things that I'd like to explain about perpetration since it's perpetrators who cause rape to happen.

[00:03:47] That's why we're starting here. We also want to start here because we don't ever want to give the impression that  it is drinking on the part of victims that cause rape to happen. We want to make sure we start with, what does alcohol do that increases the likelihood of men perpetrating? So first of all, it increases the likelihood.

[00:04:19] That people are drinking. I mean, that seems pretty obvious, but rape isn't as likely to happen in a classroom as it is at a party or a bar. Second of all, rape and other forms of sexual assault have in a joking way been described as guys put on beer goggles, but in a more scientific sense, we call that  misperception of social cues.

[00:04:48] There are very historical research studies where they dress women who work for the scientist in different costumes, like a more revealing blouse versus a turtleneck shirt and where they change out, whether she is drinking water. Are some other obvious non-alcoholic beverage, versus if she is drinking an alcoholic beverage, the male participant doesn't realize that  the woman he is interacting with is not an actual  fellow student, that she is put there to play a role.

[00:05:35] And then men are asked, how likely is this woman to have sex with you? And in some of the more offensive, original studies, how responsible for rape would she be? So let's not talk about the irresponsible old studies that people don't do anymore. The more important thing is that they're more likely to see you to, to want to have sex.

[00:06:00] Maya Angelou in, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, said you have to be careful with the white man, because when you smile, they see your underpants. I hope I got those words. Right. But that's a really concrete example of how cues can be misinterpreted, especially when people have been drinking. Then there's the second obvious impact of alcohol on your brain because your impulse control becomes lessened.

[00:06:40] When you have turned off certain parts of the brain that generally instruct you not to use swear words in front of your boss or, you know, take your shirt off during a class session. But when you've been drinking, you don't make decisions about social appropriateness as well. And the last thing I kind of lump together as rape myths and poor knowledge. It is absolutely amazing to me, even to this day, how many men believe that it is okay to have sex with a woman who's intoxicated and can't even stop what's happening, but that's okay.

[00:07:32] They're completely shocked when you show them the legal statutes and they find out that that's actually one of the tactics that is in law as a form of rape. And that furthermore, they think alcohol is an excuse. So yeah, well maybe she might've been  not exactly wanting to, but she was drunk, I was drunk. So we were all drunk. And since everyone was doing the wrong thing, then it makes a right. It makes it makes  it okay. That's that would be my short answer of the three points, beer goggles, impulse control, and poor knowledge about what constitutes sexual assault.

[00:08:23] Chad Sniffen: [00:08:23] Thank you. So for poor knowledge, one thing that in prevention work I've kind of been struggling with is the idea that talking about rape myths reinforces them in some way. Do you think that the way to correct poor knowledge is to talk about what people who identify as men  should know or do you think it's better to correct them on what's wrong about what they know.

[00:08:43] Mary Koss: [00:08:43] It really discourages me when I think about how many years we have been trying to do the work that you just described. And also how many evaluations we have that, that work does not have lasting effects. And also some indication that the other part you said is that it may have unintended negative consequences. Making men feel blamed and therefore getting them more angry and hostile, which in itself is a cause of assaulting people. I'm at the point where it's, you know, nine out of ten rapes that college men admit perpetrating and they call them, they're willing to disclose, like, let's say the, the critical elements of rape. If you ask them, did you have oral, anal or vaginal sex with someone through force, threat of bodily harm or when the victim was incapacitated and unable to consent or stop what was happening pretty much nine out of ten rapes that men will admit to.

[00:10:02] And this figure has not changed in forever. It was exactly the same in 1987, as it is today, nine out of ten admissions that I did an act that has the defining characteristics of rape nine out of ten admissions are of this type. That I used a weapon that I use force. You do not see that on college campuses, you do in  a notable fraction of cases see alcohol and they held her down, but now going to it, just staying with the nine idea, nine out of ten rapes involved an intoxicated victim and only about nine out of a hundred men who admitted this type of act, thought that it was rape.

[00:11:12] That gets me to the gist of your question, which is, I think it's pretty important that we get across to people. This is rape and it doesn't matter whether you're drinking or you're not drinking. It doesn't matter whether you put extra strong alcohol in something and didn't tell a person, it doesn't matter if the person was drinking a lot voluntarily.

[00:11:36] It doesn't matter if there was a drug in the alcohol, or if the person was taking drugs independently of the alcohol, none of that matters having sex is a red light. If a person is intoxicated to the point. That they are unable to consent or stop what is happening. That is not an opportunity. That is not a cool thing. That is not a notch on your belt. That is a crime.

[00:12:09] Chad Sniffen: [00:12:09] Thank you. And I am also discouraged about how long we've been doing the same work seeing sometimes very marginal results. It seems. But also, I mean, I also get encouraged just in, in meeting more especially young men who seem to have gotten the message someplace else.  I feel like I meet a higher fraction of those young men the longer I work in this field. So I'm encouraged by that. 

[00:12:30] Mary Koss: [00:12:30] Well, I have to be really careful with my students and in fact when you, Chad and I used to work together. And when, when we were working together, we had a young student in our office who came in to me one day and said, you know, I sometimes feel sexually harassed in here.
  
What said was so many bad things were said about men and it made him feel uncomfortable about being a man. So, I just kept reassigning those nines, but there's another really important high number, which is that most men never do anything sexually aggressive at all. We're talking about a fraction of men. If you want to go all the way from cat calls, we're talking about half of men. If you want to only confine it to rape, we're talking, depending on what year you want to pick and what data source you want to use, where we're talking anywhere from five to nine percent of men.

[00:13:37] Most men don't do anything that's sexually aggressive. We have a smaller group of men who don't understand that when you have sex with someone who's intoxicated, it's rape. They don't do it, but they think it would be okay, and they will either through pressure or through encouragement, feed into the motivation of people who also don't know that what they're doing is rape. They're doing it. I don't want people to get confused though, by saying most men are not sexually assaultive to feed into the myth that all of the rapes on campus are perpetrated by a small number of men who go from one victim to the next and just accumulate a very high number of victims as they go through the years of their college.

[00:14:52] Most men don't do anything that's sexually aggressive. We have a smaller group of men who don't understand that when you have sex with someone who's intoxicated, it's rape. They don't do it, but they think it would be okay, and they will either through pressure or through encouragement, feed into the motivation of people who also don't know that what they're doing is rape. They're doing it. I don't want people to get confused though, by saying most men are not sexually assaultive to feed into the myth that all of the rapes on campus are perpetrated by a small number of men who go from one victim to the next and just accumulate a very high number of victims as they go through the years of their college.

[00:16:07] We actually wrote a paper on this and it appeared in the journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics, because college students are considered emerging adults. They're not considered fully formed adults. The gist of this paper was we really tried to sort out this idea of serial rape and what we found is yes, there is indeed a group of people who have multiple victims.

[00:16:37] However, this group of people account for only a quarter of rape. And if you just want to focus your law enforcement or your misconduct consequences on trying to sniff out. These people who are repeat offenders, you will miss three quarters of the rapes that happen on campus. So, I don't think anyone wants to make that mistake of, of directing a message and directing a whole bunch of your resources, your law enforcement and your investigatory resources to a group of people who are not really accounting for the vast majority of the problem.

[00:17:31] Elizabeth Anderson: [00:17:31] I would just add that part of the issue here is certainly there's a lack of knowledge among young men, but young women also demonstrate a lack of knowledge of what constitutes rape or sexual assault and will have had these experiences, especially on a college campus and not describe them as rape or sexual assault.

[00:17:50] And I think that just speaks to how ingrained alcohol consumption is as part of the culture of the American college experience and that this is part of how sex happens in American college culture in the context of the presence of alcohol. Though certainly individual knowledge is a component it's when we look at this in community or environmental levels of the culture around alcohol use in sex that's part of where the problem lies as well.

[00:18:20] Chad Sniffen: [00:18:20] Thank you for listening. This is the end of part one. Join us for part two where we continue this conversation about the intersection of alcohol and sexual violence.