ABSTRACT
This chapter is a speculative attempt to integrate two substantive bodies of research in the area of sexual assault. First, a long-standing research effort by Knight and Prentky at the Massachusetts Treatment Center (MTC) has been directed toward the development of a typology of rapists, beginning with clinical attempts and culminating in an empirically based typology. Second, a large number of studies has been conducted comparing rapists and nonoffenders in their erectile responses to descriptions of rape and consenting sexual activities. Based on the sexual arousal literature, Barbaree and Marshall (1991) have described six different models that could account for arousal during rape. These authors suggested that the mechanism of sexual arousal and its role in rape might be different in different rapists, and briefly suggested how different models of rape arousal might apply to different subtypes of rapists. The present chapter is an extension and elaboration of this speculation. It places the MTC subtypes in a two-dimensional table containing two levels of a variable akin to criminal personality, and a second factor comprised of three models of sexual arousal, namely: disinhibition-state, inhibition-trait, and a model of arousal in sadism. These three models, ordered in this way, reflect the manner in which and the degree to which anger or hostility strengthens sexual arousal during rape. Then, various MTC subtypes are allotted, in a rational way, to the six cells in the two-dimensional table. This chapter defines sadism in terms of two possible models of sexual arousal during rape. The speculation presented here makes specific predictions concerning patterns of sexual arousal among various
Along the same lines, Malamuth (1986) reported that a complex of dispositional factors predict sexually aggressive behavior among men, including: (a) sexual arousal in response to aggression, (b) the identification of dominance as a motive for sexual acts, (c) hostility toward women, and (d) attitudes accepting of violence against women. Similarly, many clinicians have postulated a continuum of individual differences in responses thought to be important in rape in the general population of men (Abel et al., 1977).
