Marital Rape Attitudes toward Marital Rape among College Students

Close to 62% of female rape victims are between the ages of 12 and 24 (Rosenthal 407), an age group which encompasses the college years. This would explain why an estimated one in four college women have been raped while attending college (Rosenthal 412). The men responsible for this statistic, between 7 and 25% of all male college students, admit to forcing a woman to have sex and most see nothing wrong with doing so. Feminist theory would have us believe that these acts are the product of males attempting to preserve a male dominated society through an act of violence, while evolutionary theory would posit that these men have low social status and therefore little chance of mating success (Rosenthal 207). Neither theory seems to capture the fact that fraternity members are responsible for at least 50% of all rapes that occur on college campuses (Rosenthal 412). It seems unlikely that the members of fraternities collude to maintain male dominance over women or represent low social status males. Instead, the most consistent explanation...

According to one study cited by Rosenthal, the majority of early adolescent boys and girls felt that rape was acceptable between a husband and wife. This may explain why up to 25% of male college students see nothing wrong with forcing a woman to have sex. To better understand the attitudes college students have towards marital rape, Auster and Leone extracted survey data to answer three questions: (1) is marital rape equivalent to stranger rape, (2) how should a married woman respond to being forced to have sex with her husband, and (3) whether they would support legislation making marital rape equivalent to stranger rape in the eyes of the law. The independent variables were gender and sorority or fraternity membership. The study sample was 1,800 college students enrolled at a private college located in the Northeastern United States.
The main finding…