Paper Title
Dealing With Date Rape
Keywords
- Date Rape
- Acquaintance Rape
- Sexual Assault
- Clinical Assessment
- Victim Treatment
- Perpetrator Treatment
- Psychotherapy
- Social Context
- Prevention Strategies
- Sexual Violence
- Assertive Communication
- Public Health
- Community Education
- Psychological Impact
- Institutional Response
- Social Change
- Trauma Recovery
- Rape Counseling
- Risk Factors
- Intervention Strategies
Journal
Publication Info
Volume: 42 | Issue: 8 | Pages: 716-716
Published On
August, 1997
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Abstract
This book is intended “to facilitate the clinician's professional growth as a knowledgeable practitioner in conceptualizing, assessing, treating, and educating members of the community about acquaintance rape” (pp. 2–3). Chapter 1 is an introduction to the definition and scope of acquaintance rape. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the causes of acquaintance rape and the social context that defines the roles of perpetrators and victims. Clinical assessment and treatment are the focus of the next two chapters that address both the victim and the perpetrator as patients. Chapter 6 outlines considerations for planning a didactic presentation on acquaintance rape depending on the intended audience with suggested outlines for various situations. The final chapter describes sexually assertive communication training intended for college students. Thus, the content of the book is consistent with the title and the vision. The study of rape is interdisciplinary and therefore one's evaluation of this book will differ depending on the assumptions and theoretical framework brought to the subject. Most experts agree that the causes of rape are multiple and operate across the life span at the individual, dyadic, institutional, and societal levels, although differences in emphasis exist. Perspectives on the most viable avenues of treatment and prevention also vary. By definition, a book that aims to prepare clinicians to assess and treat rape by means of one–to-one psychotherapy places the primary locus for the causes of rape and its effects within the individual. This particular framing would be seen from the perspectives of community psychology, social work, and public health to promote individual introspection over social change, to overly medicalize a cost–effective social problem, and to ignore cost–effective group approaches in the treatment repertoire. A subtext that runs through a number of chapters is that acquaintance rape affects the victim differently than stranger rape. Although intuitively appealing, the empirical grounding for this position is underdeveloped. It may turn out that hypothesizing these differences is a little bit like asking whether it is worse to be a pedestrian hit by a Cadillac or a Ford.
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