Reactions to Resistance: The Role of Contextual Factors in Sex Offending

Abstract

Upon encountering victim resistance during the commission of a sexual assault, an offender makes a decision as to how to react to the resistance via the use of varying degrees of coercive or noncoercive tactics. Exhaustivechi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) analyses were performed on a sample of 369 criminal events to detect the significant situational and crime-specific factors, the pertinent interactions between these factors, and how these affect an offender’s reaction to victim resistance depending on whether the victim is a child or an adult. Findings show that multiple interactions do occur and, moreover, factors affecting the offender’s reaction to victim resistance are very different depending on whether the victim is a child or an adult. Planning and preparation variables, such as the offender’s attack strategy, were found to be significant in the child victim model, whereas reactive variables, such as the type of victim resistance, were found to be significant in the adult victim model. The findings lend support to the social interactionist perspective and the importance of victim–offender dynamics.