Sexual Violence : Beyond the Feminist-Evolutionary Debate

The debate between feminist and evolutionary scholars about sexual violence has resulted in polarized ideas about whether sex offenders' motives are sexual, nonsexual, or both. Spivak examines the history of this controversy, and then evaluates national victim survey and police data to test hypotheses about victim-targeting in rape incidents. The primary question is whether offenders preferentially select victims based on youth, or more indiscriminately based on convenience and proximity, examining the age distribution of victims and offenders across relationships and other measures of routine activity. Results reveal that offenders may be more sexually motivated than implied by some feminist assertions, since they appear to specifically target younger victims, but these facts are explainable within a criminological framework that does not require a direct evolutionary adaptation.