Rape is a Theoretical Crime: Part 4 - Why Do Men rape?

There is no simple or single answer to this question but believing in rape myths and shamed masculinity are common in men who rape. This might give us a path to prevention.

Brock Turner, convicted of rape in 2016 and sentenced to 6 months in prison.

This is part four of a series on sexual violence.

• Part One: The Data examines the available data on rape and sexual assault in Australia, which shows that men have raped or sexually assaulted at least one quarter and possibly more than half the women in Australia.

• Part Two: Understanding Rape Myths looks at rape myths and how they are used to obscure the reality of sexual violence.

• Part Three: Shame Must Change Sides on Gisèle Pelicot’s declaration that ‘when you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them’ and the effect of shame on people who have been raped or sexually assaulted.

This article is about rape and sexual violence. Helplines are listed at the end. Please call them if you are hurt, shaken, scared, in pain or you just want someone to talk to.

There is no simple answer to the question of why men rape. ‘Because they can’ is a flippant response to such a serious question, but that doesn’t stop it being true – men who commit rape rarely experience any consequences.

There are, of course, other far more complex reasons men perpetrate sexual violence and very few of them are included in the common rape myth scripts.

While men who rape might have different motivations, rape, at its core, is a crime of contempt. The rapist’s fleeting gratification is achieved through contemptuous indifference to someone’s else’s peaceful dominion of their own body.

Whatever his motivation then, the first requirement for any rape must be that the rapist can see another person’s body as a thing. Not a person but an object stripped of humanity, existing only to serve his purpose. Having achieved this, he then must have a reason to rape, which is where we get into the complexities of rape motivation.

What does the evidence say about motivations for rape?

Power, vengeance, anger, and aggression were found, in a one study, to be common motivations for rape. Rape can also be about control, ignorance, entitlement, dominance, or lack of empathy. It can be driven by revenge and anger, or fulfillment of a fantasy. It is sometimes opportunistic but it can also be deliberate, planned, or punitive. Occasionally it is sadistic and thrill seeking. While sexual gratification is sometimes part of the motivation for rape, it’s almost never the sole reason.

Despite the common misconception, men do not rape because they are so overcome by lust that they lose control or are unable to tell that the person they’re with doesn’t want sex. In fact, evidence says most men are able to recognise and understand the verbal and non-verbal cues of consent. This is true in both brief and long term relationships.

If a sexually aroused man ignores the signs that his partner does not consent, the rape he commits is a choice, not a loss of control. He will, however, often blame his actions on the woman he raped or shift responsibility to his need for ‘intimacy’, ‘self-affirmation’ or ‘peer approval’, as if rape can provide him with these rewards.

Such a distorted perspective must have a source, and the obvious one is childhood abuse, which can and does have many terrible effects on people.

A 2018 study by the University of Washington attempted to understand how different kinds of abuse in childhood affects men’s risk of being abusive as adults. They found a link between childhood abuse and men who go on to physically abuse their partners or children as adults, but no link to increased risk of committing sexual violence.

Other studies have found a connection between childhood abuse and sexually violent men, but all the research I can find shows that most people who were abused as children do not grow up to be rapists.

One thing that is clear in all the studies of the connection between childhood abuse and adult sexual violence: there is a gendered difference.

Traumatic childhoods, particularly sexual abuse, may be a risk factor for committing sexual violence, although the findings for this are inconsistent. Where a link is found, however, it is significantly more common in men than women. Additionally, childhood abuse (again, particularly sexual abuse) puts everyone at higher risk of being sexually victimised by violent men, but this risk appears to be higher for women than it is for men, and higher still for gender diverse people.

In other words, childhood abuse always causes suffering. If has an impact on someone’s involvement in violence as an adult, it tends to make men more likely to commit violence, but for women and gender diverse people, it means they are more likely to be the victims of sexual violence.

A 2013 review of almost 200 studies on risk of perpetrating sexual violence found no significant connection to family characteristics (poverty, addiction, crime etc in the family). It also found the evidence on interpersonal skills (including typical cues of neurodiversity) was mixed and difficult to interpret. The inconsistency of results is enough to suggest there’s not a significant causal link. Similarly, drug use has inconsistent evidence but studies of men who drink alcohol have found consistent and significant connections to sexual violence when those men also believe in myths about gender and rape.

Mental illness does not cause men to rape. A review of almost 20 years of research in the US found that mental illness was far more likely to put someone at risk of being the victim of violence than the perpetrator. While some types of severe mental illnesses (psychosis etc requiring hospitalisation) are associated with violence that is investigated, charged and convicted, it doesn’t seem to be linked to the vast majority of sexual violence.

Poverty, which is often a risk factor in criminal behaviour, is not connected to rape. Rich and poor men commit rape with roughly equal frequency.

The biggest risk factor for committing rape is not childhood abuse, poverty, mental illness or substance abuse. It’s being a man. Obviously, this alone is not enough. Not all men are rapists.

Research on why men commit sexual violence was much more common in the 1980s and 1990s than it has been in the last 20 years. However, analysis of 25 research papers published between 2000 and 2021 found one characteristic most often associated with men who commit sexual violence: believing in rape myths and hostile gender myths. This was more common than any of the stereotypical reasons, such as mental illness or depravation.

Men in mostly male friendship groups are also at higher risk, but only when those groups condone beliefs and behaviour that objectifies or is hostile to women. Men who spend a lot of time in fraternities or sports clubs where those attitudes are not prevalent didn’t show the same risk. In other words, it’s the attitudes and behaviour, not the male dominated groups, that creates the risk.

There is also interesting evidence that suggests belief in traditional gender roles is only a significant link to sexual violence if those beliefs are hostile and aggressive. Men are not likely to rape if their beliefs about gender lead them to open a door for a woman because they think it’s good manners, but they don’t find it funny to humiliate or degrade women. Men who let women open doors themselves but laugh at faked nudes of women are much higher risk.

I’m not saying that benign sexism does no harm or that we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it, only that evidence suggests it’s not directly linked to sexual violence. Sexism that is hostile and contemptuous, however, does show a link.

To get an idea of what hostile beliefs and behaviours look like, these are some examples I’ve heard in the last few years that boys and men have either done or laughed about their friends doing:

• Pulling off an unconscious woman’s clothes and urinating on her.

• Driving through St Kilda to throw beer cans and rotten food at sex workers

• Putting tampon boxes full of dog shit in women’s bags.

• Sharing fake nudes of girls who rejected them with fake ‘SLUT’ tattoos on their breasts.

• Placing bets on who could get a naked photo of a girl perceived as ‘ugly’ then sharing it around the campus.

• Sharing a faked image of their homeroom teacher being gang raped.

Organisations such as Our Watch often set the terminology for public discussion of men’s violence. When they talk about the ‘drivers of gender based violence’ being ‘gender inequality’ and ‘disrespect towards women’, they’re talking about the reasons men do things like the above examples, and the effects these actions have on people of all genders. The terminology is dreadful, but I understand why it happens. Ten years of Coalition government, with Christian Porter leading the charge to defund feminist organisations and crisis services, made many government funded organisations understandably risk averse and terminology that doesn’t say anything can’t upset anyone. Unfortunately though, bland language combined with the sectors’ unfortunate tendency to semantic saturation (repetition that makes words meaningless), renders too much of the public discussion about prevention of men’s violence incomprehensible to anyone outside the sector. The wider problems in the language we use about men’s violence is a topic for another time, but I think it’s helpful to know what terms like ‘gender inequality’ are trying to explain.

The key to understanding this behaviour might lie in another branch of research on men’s violence: shame.

Shame as a precursor of rape

When Gisele Pelicot said ‘it is not for us to have shame, it is for them’ she was talking about feeling shame over the rape itself. Most men who rape women don’t feel shame or even guilt about committing rape. They tend to believe they don’t need to.

Many of them, however, do feel a very deep sense of shame. Not about the sexual violence they’ve committed, but about their own masculinity.

I wrote about shame in more details in part three of this series, but to summarise, shame is different to guilt. Shame is a painful feeling of inherent unworthiness, it’s about who we think we are, whereas guilt is about what we think we’ve done.

Helen Block Lewis, in her 1971 book, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis clearly delineated this different between shame and guilt. She also coined the term ‘humiliated fury’ to describe the violence used by shamed men to regain a feeling of power.

Dr Micheal Lewis, in his book Shame: The Exposed Self, said the key elements of shame are the person’s belief that there is:

• A violation of some role or standard

• A failure to meet expectations

• A defect of the self that cannot easily be repaired.

If we apply these elements of shame to gender myths that dictate men should be powerful, virile, and dominant, the opposite of every supposed feminine quality, a man who believes in these myths would be highly vulnerable to shame if he also believes he’s failing to live up to the myths. This is not a small risk. A 2024 Australian study of men’s beliefs about masculinity found 42 percent of young men agreed that a ‘real man’ would never say no to sex’ and 50 percent agreed that ‘guys should act strong even if they feel scared or nervous inside’.

If a man believes his masculinity is the defining characteristic of his identity, and he also believes that masculinity earns respect by being sexually dominant and aggressive, he will feel every failure to meet that standard as overwhelming shame, as evidence that he is unlovable and unworthy. The slightest hint of disrespect from others will feel to him like proof they have seen his shameful self, and they are disgusted by him. Violence, particularly sexual violence, is his means of proving to himself that he is powerful - shameless rather than shameful.

Dr James Gilligan worked as a psychiatrist in the American prison system for 25 years. In his book, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, he wrote, ‘I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked…by feeling shamed’. He described men who had committed the most horrific crimes against women as feeling shame so devastating it resulted in what he called the ‘death of self’ and said that the ‘purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it...with pride’.

Shame mutes a person’s ability to feel empathy. It can both create anger and increase the intensity of anger. It also reduces a shame-prone person’s willingness to control aggression, whereas guilt tends to inhibits anger and aggression.

There is a horrible logic to sexual violence for a man who feels deep shame about his masculinity. Rape is power, dominance and control, wrapped into a single act of virile subjugation.

Men with elevated shame are more likely to physically, emotionally and sexually abuse their female partners. Men who commit sexual violence almost always showed high levels of shame, although this did not mean they felt guilt about their crimes.

Men who feel this shamed masculinity need something very different from women than what they need from other men. At the most extreme end, for example, misogyny mass murderer Elliot Rodger, women exist only to dispense the love and sex as an antidote to shame. Rejection by women is confirmation that shame is real and deserved. So, women are both an omnipresent need and an omnipotent threat to shamed men.

Other men are not expected to provide love and intimacy. Rather, they offer amelioration of shame by affirming each other’s virility, power, and dominance. They can do this with shared laughter at weaker men and shared contempt for women thought watching and laughing at violent porn together or collectively taunting women in public, and, at its worst, gang rape. This is why men so rarely see shame in each other. All they’re allowed to see is the performance of confidence and power.

Jess Hill, in her celebrated book, See What You Made Me Do, devoted a chapter to shame and the research that connects it to violence. She writes that the source of much male violence is ‘buried deep inside, where an insatiable hunger for intimacy and belonging had mutated into violence through contact with another powerful emotion – shame’.

For such men, anything perceived as a challenge, rejection, diminishment, ridicule, or ignoring can trigger shame. The only response a man gripped by shame can allow himself is a performance of ego, power, or dominance, which is often expressed through violence.

The connection between shame and hostile gender myths might explain why some men, even men who believe in traditional gender roles, are never violent. If their sense of self is tethered to things beyond their adherence to gender myths – their race, or physical strength, or even their sense of being a calm and good person - they don’t feel the shame about not meeting gendered expectations and therefore don’t react with fear, rage and violence.

This is not to suggest shame is the only reason men are violent, but it is such a looming presence in so much of men’s violence that we cannot ignore it. A better understanding of gendered shame might also explain why all kinds of violence, but particularly sexual violence is so gendered.

The combination of believing in hostile gender myths and feeling shamed because of them, as well as believing in rape myths that justify sexual violence and blame victims creates the perfect conditions for men to commit rape. It also gives us a place to start in preventing, or at lease reducing sexual violence.

Children and teens who are still forming their understanding of themselves and their place in the world can be particularly vulnerable to shame and distorted beliefs about gender. I’ve seen it in so many schools where epithets such as ‘cuck’ and ‘mangina’ are common, and insecure boys will react with rage if their attempts to use these terms to shame other boys don’t work. The strength and confidence to shrug off shame is not something all teenage boys can easily achieve. Even boys who wholeheartedly reject gender myths can still crumble a bit when other boys call them ‘weak little soy boys’ (a derogatory term implying a boy is weak and feminised by consuming the phytoestrogen in soy milk rather than ‘manly’ food like dairy products and red meat).

Sometimes this gender shame is born of neglect or abuse, but young and vulnerable boys can also learn shame from constant exposure to people who revile masculine weakness and female strength. It might start in infancy when boys are told to toughen up when they cry. It can even be hidden in praise: ‘you’re such a big strong boy’. Or it can be imposed when insecure or uncertain teens are exposed to influences such as professional misogynist Andrew Tate, whose core business is manufacturing male shame for profit.

To be clear, I am not saying shame is an excuse or a justification for violence. Nothing excuses or justifies deliberate harm to another person. But if we can attempt to understand the feelings behind the actions, we have a much better chance of understanding what we can do to prevent or at least reduce sexual violence. One way to do that is to understand that simply debunking gendered shame is not enough. We need to replace it with something else.

The flip sides of shame and guilt are self-worth and self-esteem.

Self-worth is the intrinsic sense of self that says ‘I am a valuable person who deserves love, respect, and consideration’. It’s based on stable characteristics that are inherent to who someone is, not what they do or how they look. Self-esteem is built on self-worth but is about the things someone does, such as what they’ve accomplished, how they look, what they say and other people’s recognition of their successes. Building self-worth and self-esteem into our understanding of gender and identity, and actively teaching this - with children and adults – certainly can’t do any harm. And there’s sound reasons to believe it could do a great deal of good.

Dr James Gilligan studied an intensive program for violent men in San Francisco prisons, which concentrated on helping them change their rigid ideas of masculinity and reduce the shame this induced in them. The program almost entirely eradicated violence inside the prison and participants recorded an 83 percent drop in recidivism compared to men from the same prison who didn’t participate in the program.

This does not mean we need to remove gender from our understanding of identity. Boys can still build manliness into their understanding of themselves. It doesn’t have to be feminised or weakened or diluted. But it cannot be rigid or small, it must include a wide variety of strengths and capacities and it cannot be policed by shaming boys who explore those variations.

It’s also not enough to just target the high risk groups. All the evidence outlined above says this change must happen in men and boys who might be at risk of committing sexual violence as well as in the friendship groups and organisations where they live and play. This means widespread, not narrowcast, change of our understanding of gender.

We already have some evidence that this might work. In 2016, Victoria introduced respectful relationships and consent education for all government schools from foundation to year 12. The roll out was patchy and inconsistent, and the full evaluation, inexplicably, still has not been released by the Victorian Department of Education. But, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey data indicates that Victoria is the only state that saw a significant reduction in sexual violence between 2016 and 2021-22. As I’ve outlined in more detail in part one of this series, PSS data almost certainty underestimates the prevalence of sexual violence, but the rate at which it underestimates wouldn’t change much between iterations of the PSS and the reduction in Victoria is significant enough to warrant further investigation. There may be other factors, but it is plausible that this education program had some impact.

We need to know much more than we do about the effective prevention of sexual violence. A plausible possibility is not enough. And far too many people are being hurt by sexually violent men while we struggle to find a solution.

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After Christmas, I’ll be delving into the evidence on how and why the legal system fails so thoroughly in its respond to rape and sexual assault. I’ll also tell a much more optimistic story of the services outside the legal system that offer compassionate and effective support to people who have been raped and sexually assaulted.

If you want to read the next instalments in the series and haven’t already subscribed, you can sign up below. I will do my best to keep them all outside the paywall, but if you can afford to subscribe it’s only $10 a month and every subscriber helps me slice away time from chasing paid work to do this work.

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Discount offer for readers

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• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

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Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

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Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au