Assignment 2 Essay

The Racial Patterning of Rape
Introduction
The article, The Racial Patterning of Rape, written by Scott J. South and Richard B. Felson talks about the collection and examining of data from almost 1,400 rapes and determining different factors which could possibly be related to interracial rape, more specifically black offenders and white victims. The second article that I am adding into this is Effects of Offender Motivation, Victim Gender, and Participant Gender on Perceptions of Rape Victims and Offenders, written by Damon Mitchell, D. J. Angelone, Brittany Kohlberger, and Richard Hirschman. This particular article touches on concepts of offender motivations, which can influence the perceptions of the victim and offenders responsibilities pertaining to the sexual assault.

Summary Scott South and Richard Felson examine four different models of the racial pattering of rape; black deprivation and politicization, black men’s sexual access to white women, macrostructural opportunity, and the attributes of victims that promote interracial social interaction (South & Felson, 1990). Even though there is some support from the conflict theory involving economic deprivation and politicization, it is a minuscule amount. Contrary to belief, interracial rapes were no more frequent in cities with high black poverty, unemployment, or racial inequality, than intraracial rapes. There is also not significant support of the theory of black men’s sexual access to white women affecting the amount of rapes because, unlike suspected, studies have shown that the higher interracial marriage rates, the lower the likelihood for a white women to be raped, then in cities where interracial marriage in less frequent (South & Felson, 1990). Blau's macrostructural theory shows that the racial patterning on rape is most strongly influenced by opportunities whites and blacks when they have interpersonal contact. Unfortunately, since none of Blau’s studies focus solely on rape, and aggregated data is needed, it is difficult to incorporate the victim and offender characteristics into the analysis and create some sound reasoning and data. However, this theory is the most consistent with results found by South and Felson. Proving that the “probability that a white women is raped by a black rather than a white offender, and the probability that a black rapist selects a white rather than a black victim, are both strongly influenced by the relative sizes and spatial distributions of the black and white populations” (South & Felson, 1990). The social interaction model concentrates “on the effect of the victim’s characteristics and attitudes on opportunities for interracial interactions rather than on marcolevel aspects of social structure” (South & Felson, 1990). There are three major conflicts between these given models are that they predict that different variables will distinguish black-on-white rapes from other racial combinations, these models make contradictory predictions on similar subjects, and the models disagree on whether black offenders will show a preference for white victims. The data from the National Crime Survey Cites Sample analyzed from two different perspectives, show that there is no concrete evidence that black rapists, given equivalent opportunities to rape a white or a black woman, prefer white victims. In fact, black offenders slightly prefer black victims to white victim (South & Felson, 1990). This study contradicts the conflict theory, which suggests that the when a black-on-white rape occurs, it is a “penultimate way for a black man to serve up revenge on his white male oppressor” (South & Felson, 1990). Damon Mitchell, D. J. Angelone, Brittany Kohlberger, and Richard Hirschman start their article talking about some of the influences the degree as to which the rape victim and rapist perceived to have influenced the actual sexual assault, can be influenced by factors that are tangential. Examples of this

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BC2 Assignment 2 Assignment