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Content note: This article concerns the topic of sexual assault and contains content that may be disturbing for some readers.
Researchers from numerous disciplines have long been interested in understanding the types of factors that make men more likely to become perpetrators of sexual assault. As you might imagine, it’s difficult to get an honest survey or interview responses when it comes to asking about the propensity to engage in sexual assault. But new research from Edith Cowan University in Australia suggests a novel approach to predicting who may be more likely to become a perpetrator of sexual assault. Instead of directly asking men about sexual assault, the researchers assessed the ways in which men look at women’s bodies. Initial evidence suggests that this measure could help predict who is more likely to perpetrate a sexual assault.
To be clear: Many men leer at women’s bodies and most of those men will never engage in sexual assault. Neither do the authors of this new study argue that all men who leer at women will commit sexual assault. Instead, the results of the study indicate that men who do commit sexual assault may be especially likely to engage in this type of behavior.
Psychological scientists frequently rely on self-report data to understand human attitudes and behaviors. But when it comes to undesirable behaviors – the kinds of things few people want to admit to doing – self-report data can be particularly unreliable. For this reason, scientists may turn to indirect methods of assessment. In the new study, the research team collected several types of data linked with perpetrators of sexual assault. The scientists were particularly interested in whether men’s “gaze behavior” could be useful in predicting attitudes related to sexual assault.
Specifically, the researchers focused on what they called pervasive body gaze behavior, defined as “effortful and uninhibited attempts to gaze at other people’s bodies.” Someone who engages in pervasive body gaze behavior is quick to leer at other people’s bodies. Earlier research using eye-tracking technology found that a brief, self-report measure of pervasive body gaze behavior predicted men’s tendency to look at women’s bodies (vs. their faces). The scale was designed to assess heterosexual body gaze behavior. So for men, a sample statement on the questionnaire would be, “No matter where I am, I typically find myself looking at the bodies of women.”
Researchers first considered that the tendency to gaze at women’s bodies might be related to sexual assault based on findings that seeing women as sexualized objects can make women seem less “human.” When you view a woman as valuable only for her body, you can fail to see the other parts of her: What is she thinking? How is she feeling? Failing to see women as fully human can be a step in initiating or justifying sexual violence against them.
In this new study, over 100 heterosexual men ranging in age from 18 to 62 completed a variety of psychological assessments. They filled out self-report scales measuring the tendency to blame victims of sexual assault. The scales contained items like, “A woman who ‘teases’ men deserves anything that might happen” and “Many women find being forced to have sex very arousing.” The men also completed a scale asking them how often they did things like touching someone against their will or making a degrading sexual gesture toward someone. Men who reported having used pornography in the past month (97% of the men in the sample) indicated the percentage of that pornography that contained violence. The men also completed a version of the Brief Implicit Association Test designed to assess whether they linked erotic words (like “sexy” and “arousing”) with aggressive words like “slap” or “smack.”
Finally, the researchers assessed men’s skin conductance response (SCR) while the men were exposed to images of female models wearing either casual clothes or just their underwear. The photos of the models were also modified so that sometimes, the women showed evidence of injury (e.g., a black eye on the face, which was created by a professional make-up artist). SCR is a general measure of physiological arousal using electrodes that can detect minute changes in sweat.
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Even though the self-report measure of pervasive body gaze behavior did not reference sexual or violent contexts, men who scored higher on this measure reported a greater tendency to blame victims of sexual assault, and higher frequency of engaging in unwanted sexual advances. Pervasive body gaze was also higher among men with a tendency to associate erotic words with violent words. Perhaps most important, men who reported high levels of pervasive body gaze showed more physiological arousal in response to images of injured women and reported watching a greater proportion of violent pornography.
Overall, the evidence from this initial study suggests that responses to a brief self-report measure about how often one gazes at women’s bodies could help identify men who might be more likely to become perpetrators of sexual assault. The measure of pervasive gaze behavior could be used to guide or evaluate educational interventions in settings like college campuses, where there is often a focus on preventing sexual assault. However, it’s important to note that while scores on this measure correlated with several worrisome outcomes related to sexual assault, these correlations were small to moderate. In other words, engaging in pervasive body gaze may be a predictor of engaging in sexual assault, but it’s far from a guarantee that a man would move from body gaze to sexual assault. Nonetheless, results suggest that a measure of pervasive body gaze could be an important part of researchers’ toolkits when it comes to learning how to prevent sexual assault.
