Drug-Facilitated, Incapacitated, and Forcible Rape: A National Study of Prevalence and Case Characteristics Among College Students and Other Young Women

As noted in a recent NIJ publication, 'No one really knows how common drug-facilitated rape is because today's research tools do not offer a means of measuring the number of incidents' (Fitzgerald & Riley, 2000, p.10). The major objective of this project is to examine the prevalence of drug facilitated sexual assault in both the campus and community settings. No major national victimization survey has included a probability household sample of young women and a probability sample of female college students to examine this question, and this study proposes to do so to fill this gap in the literature. Victimization surveys will be conducted with a household probability sample of 2000 U.S. young adult women and 1000 women between the ages of 35 and 55, and then compared with a national probability sample of 2000 female college students. The proposed project has five specific aims: 1) to obtain national prevalence data for DFR, IR, and FR among young adult women and college students; and 2) to obtain information about key case characteristics of DFR, IR, and FR cases (e.g. drug use by victim and perpetrator, victim perpetrator relationship, assault location, injuries sustained, reporting to law enforcement or others, receipt of medical care, and criminal justice case progression; 3) to assess barriers to disclosure of rape cases to the CJS and to friends as well as opinions about how to increase disclosure; 4) To compare DFR, IR, and FR with respect to risk factors for prevalence, mental health impact, descriptive case characteristics, reporting to police, reasons for reporting or not reporting to law enforcement, and CJS progression; and 5) To prepare a user-friendly report describing study results addressing implications for future research, CJS practice, and services for DFR, IR, and FR victims. The inclusion of a community sample of 1000 women between the ages of 35 and 55 will enable comparisons with data provided by the National Violence Against Women Survey.