Risk Factors and Sexual Assault Prevention

Sexual assault prevention programming remains a confused, scattered, and sporadic enterprise with little scientific underpinning, and technical and political consequences of this fundamental ambiguity are traced.

Abstract

Sexual assault prevention programming remains a confused, scattered, and sporadic enterprise with little scientific underpinning. This situation reflects general American policy biases against sexuality-related interventions and against “merely preventive” programs. More distinctively, sexual assault prevention suffers because it fully fits neither the traditional crime-prevention model nor the traditional public-health model of prevention programming. Technical and political consequences of this fundamental ambiguity are traced, and some consideration is given to a transcendental alternative model.