Handbook on Sexual Violence (38 page)

areas for discussion as there clearly are issues relating to the pathologising– normalising dimension underpinning sexual violence to which this
chapter addresses itself. Notwithstanding the routinised nature of sexually violent behaviours and the unreported nature of victim experiences, the emphasis in the present chapter will focus on subcategories of crime within the spectrum of sexual violence and demonstrate that there is a range of offenders including those who manifest personality-disordered pathologies.

Another implication of Marx’s summary of findings is the often minimalising or ignoring of claims of sexual violence victimisation. Implied but not stated is also the perception that many claims are believed to be false. The chapter will show that assertions of false allegations are common to all forms of sexual violence.

Definitional framing

Kelly offers the following definition of sexual violence:

any physical, visual, verbal or sexual act that is experienced by the woman or girl at the time or later as a threat, invasion or assault that has

the effect of hurting her or degrading her and/or takes away her ability to control intimate contact.

(Kelly 1988: 41)

Clearly her focus is on women and girls as resisters of and copers with the exertion of male controlling power in the form of sexualised violence. Moreover, the definition is contextualised by the idea that the sexualised violence takes away women’s sexual autonomy. There are problems with anchoring the definition in this way. It is certainly the case that there is a gender disparity in terms of the victims and perpetrators of sexual violence. Ministry of Justice Statistics for 2008/9 show, on the one hand, the pattern of victimisation in England and Wales for those between 16 and 59 years of age (Figure
7.1), where clearly women are the more likely targets both in terms of lifetime prevalence and current cases. On the other hand in 2007/8 0.3 per cent (838) of women had been arrested for a sexual offence compared with 2.5 per cent (31,178) of men.

Figure 7.1
Incidence and prevalence (since 16 years of age) of intimate violence experienced in 2008/09 in England and Wales

However, there are female perpetrators of sexual violence as shown by these figures and male victims (Abdullah-Khan 2008: Wijkman
et al
. 2010). There is also violence within same-sex relationships (Hester
et al
. 2010). Bartol and Bartol (2008) report rates as high as 44 per cent of gay men and 56 per cent of gay women suffering some form of physical abuse. They note that pre- pubescent girls are thought to commit sexual offences at a much higher rate that commonly supposed. Moreover, there are other consequences of sexualised violence as well as the threats to choices about what sex to have, with whom and when, such as damage to personal or community relationships (Giner-Sorolla and Russell 2009).

Kelly makes it clear that the range of behaviours defined by those experiencing sexual violence are neither reflected in legal codes nor in researchers’ analytic categories. She conceptualised a continuum of sexual violence comprising:

• threats of violence;
  

• sexual harassment;
  

• pressure to have sex;
  

sexual assault;

obscene phone calls;

coercive sex;

domestic violence;

flashing;

rape;

incest.

She argues that these specific forms of sexual violence do not have strict boundaries, rather they ‘shade into’ one another (pp 75, 132) such that there are no clean, discrete analytic categories or straight lines connecting different experiences of sexual violence. Furthermore, the continuum does not imply either a linear progression or progressive seriousness; rather she presents the continuum as a quantum, i.e. of prevalence to underscore their derivation from normal routines of life. She argues that there are three common underlying dimensions: violence is physical and/or sexual; abuse involves single or multiple events; assaults can be by people known or unknown to the victim. However, given Kelly’s conditions and exceptions, it is difficult to extract the explanatory power of the continuum. First there are the problematics of the meaning of the verbal labels and second the meaning attached to the frequencies. Helen Jones, in Chapter
8 of this Handbook, discusses the symbolic importance of language that describes sexual violence and cautions against terminology that may obscure rather than clarify. Kelly’s conceptualisation seems to assume a degree of equivalence in the categories that masks subcategories nested within assigned labels. In other words obscene phone calls are a rather specific behaviour whereas sexual harassment is much broader and indeed may include obscene phone calls. Stalking has been conceptualised as a form of domestic violence rather than as a discrete category (Mullen
et al
. 2000). So Kelly’s categories are not mutually exclusive and some are higher order categories which can themselves be broken down into more specific behaviours. What do the numbers mean other than rate of reported occurrence if the categories are neither progressively more serious nor linked in some way? That some kinds of sexual violence occur more often than others is not in itself explaining very much. There is research to suggest that previous behaviour can indeed predict escalation in terms of rising levels, increasing episodes and shorter gaps between episodes and was found to predict murder in domestic violent relationships (Campbell
et al
. 2003). Wyre and Swift (1990: 55) suggest that ‘men who commit [obscene phone calls] may be at the beginning of a career of sexual offending destined to take them to rape and even murder.’ Salfati (2008) proposes, with respect to homicide, that frequency of behaviours related to an underlying dimension of impulsiveness. Thus high-frequency behaviours such as multiple wounds confined to a relatively small area of the body, or the body being found face up and uncovered, suggested a degree of impulsivity rather than planning, with an emotional component rather than being organised. Low frequency behaviours had a more instrumental theme, bringing a weapon to the scene, taking property from the scene. Offenders engaging in these rarer behaviours were also more likely to exhibit a greater degree of forensic awareness and

attempted to cover their tracks, implying a level of pre-planning. Thus, for Salfati, the continuum of frequencies is where ‘the offender reacts in an impulsive way towards the emotions engendered through the conflictual interpersonal relationship with the victim, to where the offender interacts with the victim much more at a removed level, both physically and emotionally’ (p. 509). This then attempts to provide an explanatory level of analysis to the frequency of the behaviours’ occurrence.

This
chapter will argue that there is a need to conceptually distinguish types of sexual violence and that there are not only common but also category- specific behaviours associated with different types of sexual violence. Moreover, similar behaviours may span the range of broader categories, e.g. threats may appear in sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape. Psychological theorising does provide a way to make such qualitative distinctions between high-frequency behaviours which are common to all manifestations of sexual violence, the more specific manifestations of sexual violation, and rarer idiosyncratic or individualised personal violation (Canter 2000). Psychological analysis also permits distinctions to be made of offender types, including those with specific pathologies, within different kinds of sexual violence. This is helpful both as a basis for treatment interventions and predictions about likely escalation and crossover between classes of violence. While it is recognised that it is not sensible to say that sexual violence is only committed by the mad, neither is it tenable to locate all sexual violence as arising from the routine and the normal.

The chapter then examines psychological theories and concepts against the backdrop of Kelly’s continuum formulation. Five specific types of sexualised violence are discussed: sexual harassment, domestic violence, stalking, rape and sexual murder. The stance taken here is to look more closely at offenders and their behaviours as well as motivations and other postulated causal factors. While some support for the idea of a continuum is found, it is argued here that there is a case for a richer conceptual differentiation with offenders/ perpetrators either maintaining strict boundaries that limit their behaviour within a category of offence or overlapping offence categories and escalating in severity.

Finally, it is worth noting that the discussion in this
chapter is for the most part limited to criminalised behaviour, not least because of the under-reporting problems and difficulties in obtaining data from the general population about non-reported sexual violence alluded to earlier.

Explanatory framing

The critical reason for theorising is to answer the ‘why’ question (Breakwell and Rose 2000: 5). Meloy (2007: 1) sets one question related to sexual violence: ‘Why on earth would someone want to pursue another who shows absolutely no interest in his or her attentions?’ Ward
et al
. (2006) present other ‘why?’ questions, such as why would men force a woman to have sex when she is drunk or asleep and ignore her obvious distress? Why are adults sexually interested in young children? They suggest that there are practical

implications in gaining the answers to these questions. Clinicians need clear descriptions of the phenomena they are dealing with and an understanding of the aetiological factors if their interventions are to be effective. Arlene Vetere (this volume) discusses the importance of such clarity if parties to intimate violence are to engage in effective conflict reduction and resolution. Thus treatment deliverers should address different motivations for offending and be aware of the different pathways to reoffending. McEwan
et al
. (2009) argue that to facilitate prompt and targeted interventions, in relation to stalking, clinicians need to conduct risk assessments to predict likely duration, escalation and recidivism rates. Proclivities in offending behaviours also have implications for supervisory arrangements. An offender convicted of child molestation may reoffend with an adult or vice versa (Cann
et al
. 2007). Others (e.g. Canter and Heritage 1990; Canter 2000; Canter and Fritzon 1998; Salfati 2008) suggest that understanding the behaviours may aid police investigations by indicating important variations between crimes that relate to differences between the people who commit them and allow inferences to be made about the likely offender. Offenders differ in their actions, intentions and motivations (Canter and Heritage 1990) and behavioural investigative advice requires accurate information regarding patterns to predict both escalation within and serial offending (Cann
et al
. 2007). Macpherson (2003) for example notes the importance of predicting those who escalate from non-contact sexual offences to sexual violence involving physical contact. Post-conviction restrictions need to be conversant with the full array of risk (Oliver
et al
. 2007) and, as Hanson and Bussie´re (1998), argue, it is important to assess chronicity in order to target those more likely to reoffend. Meloy (2007) states that ‘why?’ questions help to set the research agenda.

Before these questions can be addressed, we need to be clear about what phenomena we are talking about, hence the requirement for clear definitions.

Definitions

Definitions are not unproblematic (Sheridan
et al
. 2003) and there are differences between legal and research codifications and what is psychologically meaningful to victims (which may result in a failure of congruence between the scholarly, legal and personal). Some theorists offer rather global and undifferentiated definitions of ‘women abuse’ such as DeKeseredy and Kelly (1993) (not Liz Kelly). Liz Kelly herself suggests a range of behaviours across the spectrum of sexual violence. As discussed above, there are some problems about the descriptive status of the labels she uses. The approach that is often taken by psychologists is to look at both internal motivations of offenders/perpetrators and the different behaviours they engage in, in order to differentiate between offence types and within offence, different types of offenders. Early researchers devised taxonomies of assailants, such as Groth
et al
. (1977) who described rapists in terms of anger or power, creating four motivational types: excitation anger, retaliation anger, power reassurance, power dominance, and a fifth opportunistic type. Prentky and Knight (1991) further distinguished the opportunistic into high and low social

competency and added a sexual type. Horvath (2010: 546) critiques the typological approach by arguing that they do not take into account the means by which perpetrators effect the violence, they tend to conflate motivation and cognitions, they lack reliability and validity and assume that individuals fall into one type such that there is no scope for hybrid types or crossover from one type to another. Horvath concluded that as yet no taxonomy has been able consistently to discriminate between different groups of offenders. So while motivational taxonomies have helped to confirm some of the underlying reasons for committing sexually violent acts and permitted some further understanding of the role of power and anger, they have been limiting, as Kelly implies. If our focus shifts from internal processes to observable behaviours, then psychological enquiry suggests that underlying actions are themes that have some psychological significance (Salfati 2008). Thus Canter and Heritage (1990) described the themes of intimacy, violence, impersonal, criminality and sexuality underpinning rape which then are associated with a cluster of associated behaviours serving the same underlying psychological purpose. The intimacy theme contains behaviours such as using the confidence trick approach, seeking verbal participation from the victim, even complimenting her and being apologetic. This characterises a type of rapist referred to as pseudo-intimate whereby the perpetrator seeks to engage with the victim as a person. Impersonal on the other hand describes behaviour that is associated with a blitz attack (use of sudden and unexpected violence incapacitating the victim) showing no response to the victim’s reactions, tearing her clothing and treating her more as an object.

So the first task in theorising is to define and differentiate subclasses of sexual violence. For present purposes five classes of sexual violence will be considered (see Table 7.1).

Table 7.1
Definitions of different types of sexual violence

Type of sexual Definition Comment violence

financial or emotional) between estimates suggest 45% of women