Coercive Rape Tactics Perpetrated Against Asexual College Students: A Quantitative Analysis Considering Students' Multiple Identities

Abstract

Sexual violence has long remained a concerning problem within higher education, yet an overwhelming majority of scholarship about collegiate sexual violence centers experiences of white, cisgender, heterosexual women (Harris et al., 2020; Linder et al., 2020), although LGBTQ students experience even higher rates of sexual violence than their cisgender and heterosexual peers (Cantor et al., 2019). The exclusion of asexual students’ experiences is not surprising given the erasure and invisibility of asexuality within hypersexualized collegiate cultures (Mollet & Lackman, 2019), but the expansion of scholarship has begun acknowledging violence experienced by asexual people, including unwanted sexual experiences (Mollet & Black, 2021; Lund, 2021). Mollet and Black (2021) found that in a sample of asexual college students, nearly one quarter had experienced rape, more than one half experienced unwanted sexual content, and nearly three quarters experienced unwanted non-contact sexual experiences during their lifetimes. Their study also identified verbal coercion tactics as more prevalent than coercion through substances. What could an asexual perspective add to understanding campus sexual assault (CSA)? Moving beyond studying the same normative population of students and considering substances as a primary risk factor can offer a more nuanced understanding of CSA. Without asexual examinations and consideration of students’ multiple identities, knowledge remains limited in ways that suggest monolithic experiences that obfuscate realities of perpetration tactics and limit innovative prevention strategies. In response, the research question guiding this analysis is: What is the relationship between asexual students’ multiple identities and predicting odds of experiencing specific coercive rape tactics used by perpetrators?