The roles of offender and victim substance use in sexual assaults: implications for risk assessment and mental health outcomes

Many sexual assaults are associated with either the perpetrator’s psychoactive substance-use, the victim’s substance-use, or both. Drugs and alcohol affect sexual arousal, disrupt higherorder cognitive processes including abstraction, conceptualization, planning, and decisionmaking, making it difficult to initiate or attend to cues that usually inhibit sexually aggressive behavior, to process moral and empathic cues and to react to each other’s emotions, intentions and behaviors. Substance-use is often used by perpetrators as an excuse for their
actions and is correlated to more severe assaults and more victim injury. The current talk presents the role of substance-use in sexual assaults based on two recently completed studies: the first sought to compare criminal risk factors of convicted sex offenders with a diagnosis of hypersexuality to those with comorbid hypersexuality and substance-use (N=156). The second study explored the association between substance-use and severe mental health
outcomes in 2,147 sexual assault victims. Findings underscore the importance of detailed alcohol and drug screening in victims seeking post-assault medical care as well as in risk assessment of sex offenders. Theoretical implications as well as practical recommendations for possible prevention and targeted interventions are discussed.