What Is Sexual Abuse?

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Sexual assault risk rises when hostile masculinity and impersonal attitudes toward sex converge.

Male peer norms can reward sexual conquest, normalize aggression, and make harmful behavior feel acceptable.

Bystanders are more likely to stay silent when they believe the other men around them will stay silent too.

I graduated from Cornell, and I was in a sorority. Today, I am a human sexuality professor at the University of Washington, where I teach The Diversity of Human Sexuality, which enrolls close to 4,000 students every year.

I am horrified by the lawsuit filed by a former Cornell student, “Jane Doe,” who, in 2024, alleges she was gang raped at the Chi Phi fraternity house. On the evening of the assault, other Chi Phi fraternity brothers sent out Snapchat messages inviting each other to come enjoy “free p—ssy,” with one who coolly asked whether the “shop is still open?”

These chilling details are obviously shocking. However, as a sex educator, I worry the underlying group dynamics that made them possible aren’t receiving nearly enough attention. I agree that these men should be held fully accountable for their actions. Yet focusing our collective rage only on the punishment of a small group of men won’t prevent the next sexual assault. Right now, we’re focused on the “who” in this case. In order to dismantle the settings that make unimaginable assaults like these possible, we need to understand the psychology of “how” and “why.”

What Makes a Man Commit Sexual Assault? The Confluence Model

One of the most thoroughly researched theoretical models for why men commit sexual assault stems from the work of Neil Malamuth. Looking at national data, Malamuth and his colleagues documented sexual aggression as occurring when two things converge. (Malamuth et al., 1991).

The first ingredient Malamuth termed “hostile masculinity,” which is characterized by distrust and resentment toward women in general. Men high on the dimension of hostile masculinity tend to approach sex as something adversarial, an accomplishment you “win” or “score” after manipulating your sexual opponent — a woman. Gratification comes from a sense of successfully controlling and/or dominating a........

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