Alcohol and Adult Sexual Assault in a National Sample of Women
Section snippets
Present Study
In the present study, sexual assault victims were identified from a national survey of American women concerning drinking behavior and potential antecedents and consequences Wilsnack et al., 1997, Wilsnack et al., 1998. This study extends past research by examining alcohol's role in sexual assaults in a nationally representative sample of women that included a physical injury outcome measure. This is also the first study to look at both victim and offender pre-assault drinking and assault
Sample
Adult sexual assault victims were identified from the 1991 National Study of Health and Life Experiences of Women, conducted as part of a 10-year longitudinal study to examine patterns, predictors, and consequences of women's alcohol drinking (see Wilsnack et al., 1997, Wilsnack et al., 1998 for more details about the survey methodology). The 1991 follow-up data was used because an assessment of adult sexual assault was specifically added only to this 1991 wave of the study. The original
Sample Characteristics
In the victim sample studied here (n=163), women were an average of 43.41 years of age (26–86 years) at the time of the survey (SD=12.25). Assaults occurred an average of 19.59 years ago (SD=11.94) for all 163 victims. Most women were Caucasian (89%), whereas 11 percent were ethnic minorities. Half of the women were currently married (47.9%). More than two-thirds of the women had children (71.2%) and were employed (66.9%) in this sample. In the past year, over two-thirds of the women in the
Discussion
The role of alcohol in the injury outcomes of sexual assaults was studied in a national sample of women. Consistent with past research, offender pre-assault drinking was associated with more stranger assaults, more victim injury, and marginally greater offender aggression Johnson et al., 1978, Coker et al., 1998, Martin and Bachman, 1998, Ullman et al., 1999a. As expected, victim pre-assault drinking was related to more stranger assaults, victim heavy episodic drinking, and more offender
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation. We thank Sharon Wilsnack for sharing the data analyzed in this study and for helpful comments on this article. The National Study of Health and Life Experiences of Women was supported by National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant R37-AA04610 to the University of North Dakota, Sharon Wilsnack, Principal Investigator.
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