It’s been estimated that approximately 85 percent of all rapes are in fact committed by assailants who are acquainted in some way with their victims, and that only a small percentage of these “non-stranger rapes” result in the successful prosecution of the rapist. So Lisak devised a study that would provide insights into offenders who’d managed to avoid both punishment and scrutiny—a population that accounted for the overwhelming majority of rapists. Specifically, he designed his study to reveal whether these “undetected rapists,” like their incarcerated counterparts, showed a propensity to rape more than once and whether they were likely to commit other types of interpersonal violence. The study, titled “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,” co-authored by Paul M. Miller and published in 2002, added significantly to the understanding of men who rape.
Lisak and Miller examined a random sample of 1,882 men, all of whom were students at the University of Massachusetts Boston between 1991 and 1998. Their average age was twenty-four. Of these 1,882 students, 120 individuals—6.4 percent of the sample—were identified as rapists, which wasn’t a surprising proportion. But 76 of the 120—63 percent of the undetected student rapists, amounting to 4 percent of the overall sample—turned out to be repeat offenders who were collectively responsible for at least 439 rapes, an average of nearly 6 assaults per rapist. A very small number of men in the population, in other words, had raped a great many women with utter impunity. Lisak’s study also revealed something equally disturbing: These same 76 individuals were also responsible for 49 sexual assaults that didn’t rise to the level of rape, 277 acts of sexual abuse against children, 66 acts of physical abuse against children, and 214 acts of battery against intimate partners. This relative handful of male students, as Lisak put it, “had each, on average, left 14 victims in their wake….And the number of assaults was almost certainly underreported.”
Upon looking at his data for the first time, David Lisak was shocked. He thought he must have made a mistake somewhere. He knew from studying earlier research done on men in prison that most violent crime is committed by a small number of individuals in any given community, he told me, “but in our survey we were looking at college students. Initially, I had trouble thinking of them as criminals.”
When Lisak went back and reexamined his data, however, it held up. Moreover, a similar study published in 2009 by Stephanie K. McWhorter, which examined 1,149 navy recruits who’d never been convicted of sexual assault, replicated Lisak’s findings: 144 of the recruits (13 percent) turned out to be undetected rapists, and 71 percent of these 144 rapists were repeat offenders. An average of 6.3 rapes or attempted rapes could be attributed to each of them. Of the 865 rapes and attempted rapes reported in McWhorter’s study, 95 percent of the assaults were committed by just 96 individuals. As Lisak had reported, a small number of indiscernible offenders—only 8.4 percent of the population studied—were responsible for a staggering number of rapes.
It should be noted that all of the subjects in the studies by Lisak and McWhorter participated voluntarily and that none of the undetected rapists identified by the researchers considered themselves rapists. When recruiting his subjects, Lisak told them that he was studying “childhood experiences and adult functioning” and promised them confidentiality. Participants agreed to complete a packet of questionnaires that asked such things as “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?” and “Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?” Although every question used explicit language to describe very specific acts, Lisak was careful never to use such words as “rape” or “assault.” Any participant who answered “yes” to one of the questions on the questionnaire was subsequently interviewed and asked follow-up questions.
When interviewing his subjects, Lisak said, “I made sure I didn’t in any way suggest that I was judging them or that I was horrified by what they were telling me. As a researcher, I am prohibited from saying anything to them that would alter their view of themselves. It’s not like I can debrief them at the end and say, ‘By the way, what you just described to me is rape.’ ”
The participants in the study had no qualms about being research subjects, Lisak told me, “because they share this common idea that a rapist is a guy in a ski mask, wielding a knife, who drags women into the bushes. But these undetected rapists don’t wear masks or wield knives or drag women into the bushes. So they had absolutely no sense of themselves as rapists and were only too happy to talk about their sexual behaviors.” Most of the student rapists interviewed by Lisak were regarded by their peers as nice guys who would never rape anyone, and regarded themselves the same way.
The serial rapists hidden in plain sight among us, Lisak explained, “harbor all the usual myths and misconceptions about rape. Additionally, we now have data showing they are more narcissistic than average. So they are caught up in their own worldview. They lack the ability to see what they do from the perspective of their victims. It’s not like they’ve spent any time thinking about what it would be like to be passed out and wake up to someone raping you. It’s not like they’ve ever asked themselves, ‘How would I feel if I fell asleep, someone climbed on top of me, and penetrated me with his erect penis?’ Rapists don’t do that. They exist in their own world, and in their world there is often a tremendous sense of entitlement.”
To illustrate a rapist’s worldview, Lisak opened his laptop and played a video he’d christened The Frank Tape. It’s a harrowing reenactment of an unedited, five-minute segment of an interview he did with a student rapist, performed by an actor who has precisely mimicked the rapist’s delivery and callous self-regard.
The segment, which I’ve abridged below, begins with “Frank” telling Lisak, “We have parties every weekend.” He goes on:
That’s what my fraternity was known for. We’d invite a bunch of girls, lay out a bunch of kegs or whatever we were drinking that night. And everyone would just get plastered….We’d be on the lookout for the good-looking girls, especially the freshmen, the really young ones. They were the easiest. It’s like they didn’t know the ropes,…like they were easy prey. And they wouldn’t know anything about drinking, or how much alcohol they could handle. So, you know, they wouldn’t know anything about our techniques….
We’d invite them to the party,…make it seem like it was a real honor. Like we didn’t just invite any girl. Which, I guess, in a way is true….Then we’d get them drinking right away. We’d have all those kegs. But we always had some kind of punch, also….We’d make it with a real sweet juice and just pour in all kinds of alcohol….The girls wouldn’t know what hit them. They’d be guzzling it, you know, because they were freshmen, kind of nervous….The naïve ones were the easiest. And they’d be the ones we’d target….
We’d all be scouting for targets during the week….We’d pick ’em out, and work ’em over during the week, and then get ’em all psyched up to come to one of our famous parties….You basically had to have an instinct for it….I had this girl staked out. I’d picked her out in one of my classes….I was watching for her,…and the minute she walked into the door of the party, I was on her….We started drinking together, and I could tell she was nervous…because she was drinking that stuff so fast….
It was some kind of punch we’d made. You know, the usual thing….She started to get plastered in just a few minutes…so I started making my moves on her. I kind of leaned in close,…got my arm around her, and then at the right moment I kissed her….The usual kind of stuff….And after a while I asked her if she wanted to go up to my room, you know, get away from the noise, and she came right away. Actually it wasn’t my room….We always had several rooms designated before the party…that were all prepped for this….
She was really woozy by this time. So I brought up another drink, you know, and sat her down on one of the beds, sat down next to her, and pretty soon I just made my move. I don’t remember exactly what I did first. I probably, you know, leaned her down on the bed, started working on her clothes, feeling her up….I started working her blouse off….
At some point she started saying things like…‘I don’t want to do this right away,’ or something like that. I just kept working on her clothes,…and she started squirming. But that actually helped, because her blouse came off easier. And I kind of leaned on her, kept feeling her up to get her more into it. She tried to push me off, so I pushed her back down….
It pissed me off that she played along the whole way and then decided to squirm out of it like that at the end. I mean, she was so plastered that she probably didn’t know what was going on, anyway. I don’t know, maybe that’s why she started pushing on me. But, you know, I just kept leaning on her, pulling off her clothes, and at some point she stopped squirming. I don’t know, maybe she passed out. Her eyes were closed.
Lisak asked Frank, “What happened?”
“I fucked her,” Frank answered.
“Did you have to lean on her or hold her down when you did it?”
“Yeah, I had my arm across her chest like this, you know, that’s how I did it.” As he spoke, Frank demonstrated how he placed his forearm against the victim’s sternum, near the base of her neck, and leaned on it to hold her down.
“Was she squirming?” Lisak inquired.
“Yeah, she was squirming,” Frank said, “but not as much anymore.”
“What happened afterwards?”
“I got dressed and went back to the party.”
“What did she do?” Lisak asked.
“She left,” Frank answered.
Lisak’s interview with Frank was typical of the interviews he did with other rapists. In a part of the interview not included above, Lisak told me, Frank “actually described two other rapes he did, under almost exactly the same circumstances, except the two other victims were unconscious from alcohol at the time. And Frank had no idea that what he was describing to me were acts of rape.”
Predators like Frank get away with it over and over, Lisak explained, because most of us are in denial. We’re disinclined to believe that someone who’s an attentive student or a congenial athlete could also be a serial rapist. But Frank and his ilk are sexual predators who do incalculable harm to their victims, and it’s crucial for police officers, prosecutors, and campus administrators to regard them as such.
The problem is, most officials who are responsible for holding rapists accountable don’t consider guys like Frank to be dangerous criminals. And even when they do, too many of them are reluctant to file charges and prosecute perpetrators of acquaintance rape, because they’re convinced that the odds of convicting acquaintance rapists are slim—too slim to justify the immense investment of time, money, and emotional capital required to mount a full-scale rape prosecution. Prosecutors justify this reluctance to prosecute by pointing out that their sworn duty is to act in the best interest of the state, not to serve as personal attorneys for victims of rape or any other crime.
David Lisak considers this rationale both self-defeating and shortsighted. He argues that failing to aggressively prosecute rapists like Frank doesn’t merely harm the many victims of acquaintance rape; it also does tangible harm to the general public. When men like Frank repeatedly rape and get away with it, Lisak said, “their behavior becomes entrenched. It’s obsessive. And once this pattern is established, it tends not to be something that just stops. Sexual predators are constantly practicing, constantly testing the boundaries of potential victims. You know how when you talk to an experienced salesperson, and after a couple of beers they’ll tell you how you can learn to read people, how you can learn techniques for closing the sale? Sexual predators are pretty much doing the same thing. It’s not that all of them are geniuses, but they are constantly honing their skills, and they get very good at it. They get much better at it than most of us are at detecting it and resisting it.”
Lisak acknowledged that prosecuting rapists like Frank is difficult. He said, however, “I absolutely disagree that such cases are impossible to prosecute. There are prosecutors across the country who have been very successful in taking them on. But it takes a lot of expertise, and a willingness to approach non-stranger rapes in a whole new way.” It also requires that prosecutors understand that a relatively small number of rapists do most of the raping. “Statistically, the odds that any given rape was committed by a serial offender are around 90 percent,” Lisak said. “The research is clear on this. The foremost issue for police and prosecutors should be that you have a predator out there. By reporting this rape, the victim is giving you an opportunity to put this guy away. If you decline to pursue the case because the victim was drunk, or has a history of promiscuity, or whatever, the offender is almost certainly going to keep raping other women. We need cops and prosecutors who get it that ‘nice guys’ like Frank are serious criminals.”
David Lisak argues that the police need to investigate rape suspects with the same diligence they use to investigate narcotics kingpins and perpetrators of organized crime. “The focus of the investigation shouldn’t simply be this one, seemingly isolated rape,” he explained. “It should be ‘Who is this suspect? Who can tell us what he’s really like? Who are the other women he may have raped?’ Detectives need to subpoena e-mail accounts, look into the suspect’s Facebook friends. They need to really dig.”
Police officers who approach rape cases in this way are likely to turn up other victims and other crimes. And when prosecutors have evidence of multiple victims, it becomes much harder for defense attorneys to attack any single victim’s credibility—the time-honored rape defense that so often results in acquittal.
PART THREE
Unwanted Attention
During my trip to Missoula, I was shocked by how many UM students found it inconceivable that an illustrious football player—a quarterback, no less—would ever rape anyone. “Those guys can sleep with anyone they want,” people told me over and over again….
For example, everyone agrees that, in the words of a man I meet under the disconcertingly fluorescent lighting at a divey sports bar called Missoula Club, football players in particular “don’t need to rape to get fucked.” This is despite the fact that at least six of the school’s football players were involved in the cases currently being investigated by the federal probe.
KATIE J.M. BAKER
“University of Montana Quarterback Charged with Rape”
Jezebel, August 1, 2012
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Beau Donaldson was arrested, on January 6, 2012, for raping Allison Huguet, it was the lead story in the next day’s edition of the Missoulian. For the next six months, Donaldson’s crime and other sexual assaults by University of Montana students were an increasingly frequent subject covered by the Montana news media. On January 8, the paper ran a piece describing Kerry Barrett’s and Kaitlynn Kelly’s frustration over the refusal by the Missoula police and the county attorney’s office to file charges against their alleged assailants. On January 11, the Missoulian published a “guest column” by Mark Muir, the chief of police, defending his actions. “Rape cases,” he wrote, “are a significant challenge; proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is even more difficult.”
On January 15, 2012, an article by Missoulian reporter Michael Moore revealed that a UM student had belatedly come forward to report being sexually assaulted in February 2011, when she was a freshman. She had been discovered unconscious in the snow outside her dormitory in the middle of the night, with her pants and underwear pulled down to her ankles. Bruises covered much of her body. “A hand had pressed down so hard on her mouth and face that an imprint was still visible,” Moore reported. Rug burns bloodied her knees.
The previous evening, she’d had too much to drink and, wh
ile walking home with a friend, stopped at a coffee shop. Someone bought her a cup of coffee, and after she drank it, she saw a group of young men pointing at her and laughing. “One of them mouthed the word ‘roofies’ at me,” she told Moore. Frightened, she ran out of the café, after which she remembered little until she was found sprawled on the frozen ground of the UM campus outside Jesse Hall and was taken to her room. The next morning, when she went to the university health center, she said, “[T] hey treated me like I was just some drunk girl. All the questions were like, ‘Well, are you sure you just didn’t fall down?’ ”
A subsequent forensic exam at the First Step sexual-assault clinic revealed that she had been raped. “I know my case probably won’t be solved,” the victim said. “But I want people to know what happened.” She decided to tell her story to the newspaper in the hope that it would motivate the university and city officials to start taking Missoula’s rape problem seriously. “[T]his is a bad thing that’s going on,” she told Moore, “and we all need to do something to try to fix it.”
On January 17, 2012, two days after Michael Moore’s article was published, UM president Royce Engstrom addressed the rash of sexual assaults at a public forum attended by 125 Missoulians, including Chief Muir, Mayor John Engen, and state legislators. “I want you to know that we take this very seriously,” Engstrom assured the audience. During a question-and-answer session following his remarks, a local social worker named Ian White told Engstrom that he believed the main cause of the problem was the Griz football team. “I respectfully disagree,” Engstrom countered, although earlier in the evening he’d acknowledged that “a small number” of university athletes were responsible for part of the problem. In a confidential memo sent to UM staff, however, Engstrom had essentially agreed with White by writing that university investigations “indicated a disproportionate association” between the sexual-assault crisis and “patterns of behavior of a number of student athletes.”