Recommendation for this book came from again my Criminology class recommended reading list which has so far proved wonderful. Scully takes a group of convicted rapists serving time for their crime and uses a control group of convicted felons (non-sexual crimes). Even more interesting I feel would have been another control group of "normal" people i.e. not incarcerated. The prison culture could well have affected opinions of felons who would have previously answered differently, maybe.
I enjoyed the parts of this book that were related to the gender expectations of the men and how these related to the normal felons. Very, very interesting. She put the men into two groups - "admitters" and "deniers," surprisingly many of the admitters still managed to find what they saw as excuses for committing their crimes, and had higher rates of traditional views of women than the common felons, while the deniers had even higher rates. It was also mentioned that the more educated the rapists were, the less likely they were to view women traditionally as something to be owned and used.
This is probably the most interesting study on sexual violence I have read to date. It gives in-depth explanations of the difference of thinking between different types of criminals, again I would be interested in an expansion to also include the general public. Understandable this would take a great deal of time. Unfortunately it's virtually impossible to do a study on all rapists without replying on self report data that can be unreliable so although this was only a study of those convicted it was still interesting to see the tip of the iceberg of sexual offenders.
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