HIV prevention efforts promote the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV and other STDs. Thus, a woman's agency to practice healthy sexual behaviors necessarily involves negotiation with another person. This poses unique challenges for women who have limited power in relationships. The current study explores how the experience of intimate…

Objective: The aim of this research was to study the discomfort experienced by adolescents when answering questions in a survey about sexuality and sexual abuse and to investigate factors that may determine possible experience of discomfort. The research focused particularly on vulnerable adolescents--sexually abused and sexually inexperienced.…

Male prison rape and sexual assaults remains a serious and sensitive issue in many countries. Human rights groups claim that sexual assaults among male prisoners have reached pandemic proportions and need to be stopped. Researchers for many years have studied the causes of male sexual assault in prison and offered numerous recommendations on its…

Perpetrating sexual coercion and rape can be conceptualized as a form of sexual risk taking. In this study, the authors evaluated the relationship between sexual aggression and other risky sexual behaviors (e.g., intercourse without a condom) using an online convenience sample of 1,240 heterosexual men. Sexually aggressive men engaged in more…

Although sexual assault has long been recognized as a problem among college students, little attention has been paid to why first-year women are the most likely to be assaulted. In this article the author drew on two studies of college students to analyze peer culture and the organization of gender and sexuality within a college party scene.…

Objectives: Previous research suggests that women's early sexual victimization experiences may influence their parenting behaviors and increase the vulnerability of their children to being sexually victimized. The current study considered whether mother's sexual victimization experiences, in childhood and after age 14, were associated with the…

To address the lack of empirically grounded measures of childhood sexual abuse severity, a survey of self-report items was developed following a thorough review of the childhood sexual abuse literature. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using data collected from a convenience sample of college students that included 275 females and…

Past theory and empirical research have consistently associated a number of risk factors with sexual assault perpetration. This study extends past research by considering if the tactics which perpetrators use to obtain sex are associated with these risk factors or with characteristics of the sexual assault. Audio computer-assisted self-interviews…

This study examines the relationship between dating violence, forced sexual intercourse (FSI), and four measures of sexual risk taking (i.e., age at first sex, number of recent (within the last three months) sex partners, alcohol/drug use at last sex, and condom use at last sex) among a sample of 1124 ethnically diverse sexually active adolescents…

College students are at high risk of experiencing serious problems related to physical and social health issues that include binge drinking, sexual assault, and contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Despite research reporting that many of these incidents co-occur on campuses, university prevention programs have failed to present the…

Focus groups (N = 15 groups; 8 with girls, 7 with boys) with adolescents in high schools near Cape Town, South Africa, were used to conduct a qualitative investigation of reported reasons for using and not using substances and for having and not having sex. Adolescents reported Enhancement, Negative States, Social, and Aversive Social motivations…

Contemporary developments in social attitudes toward prostitution and prostitutes influence both social policies and the social work profession. Understanding individuals' attitudes toward these issues is necessary for the development of social interventions and policies aimed at reducing stigmata attached to them. This article describes a new…

Guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the authors examined prospective associations of attitudes, norms, and control with sexual aggression (SA) perpetration 1 year later among male college students. Data were collected from 652 males via confidential, self-report surveys at the end of their 1st and 2nd years in college. Results…

Background: The incidence of psychological, physical, and sexual violence in intimate dating relationships has a significant impact on young people. These issues are of great concern to researchers, educators, and administrators who strive to help youth be happy and healthy. This review focused on prevention and intervention efforts implemented in…

Social workers responsible for developing rape prevention programs on college campuses must have valid evaluation instruments. This article presents the challenges encountered by the authors when they attempted to keep rape myth measures relevant to student populations by updating the language to reflect the subtleties involved with rape myths.…