Research has found that approximately half of women who report an experience that meets the legal definition of rape do not label it rape. It has been assumed that labeling the experience as rape is necessary and beneficial for recovery; however, conflicting findings have been reported. In the present study, a longitudinal design was utilized to…

College women who did (n=33) and did not (n=56) label their sexual assault experience as rape provided written descriptions of their sexual assaults. From these descriptions we identified eight different sexual assault situations. Women who labeled their experience as rape were most likely to have been assaulted forcefully by an acquaintance,…

Data from 198 female college students, of whom 24 were acknowledged rape victims, 22 were unacknowledged victims, and 152 were nonvictims, indicate that unacknowledged victims possess more violent rape scripts than acknowledged victims. Unacknowledged victims may not define experiences as rape because their scripts do not match experiences. (SLD)

In this study we examined the ability of a modified Sexual Experiences Survey (SES; Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987) to assess sexual victimization among a local community sample of women (n= 1,014). Women who reported sexual victimization were interviewed regarding the most recent incident. Those who responded negatively to all SES items…

Only a few studies have examined the characteristics of sexual assault based on the tactics used by the perpetrator. In this study we compared the experiences of women who were forced to engage in vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse due to verbal coercion, physical force, or intoxication. Random-digit dialing was used to obtain a sample of 272…