David Lisak
| David Lisak | |
|---|---|
| Website | www |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Duke University |
| Thesis title | Motives and psychodynamics of non-incarcerated rapists |
| Thesis year | 1989 |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Massachusetts Boston |
| Main interests | Clinical psychologist (retired) |
| The 2013 Women's History Month Keynote Address at Emory University, 28 March 2013 | |
 David Lisak: Confronting the Reality of Sexual Violence on the College Campus via YouTube |
David Lisak is an American clinical psychologist. He received his PhD from Duke University, and is a retired Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Lisak's research focuses on "the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence...motives and behaviors of rapists and murderers, the impact of childhood abuse on adult men, and relationship between child abuse and later violence."
Lisak began his research in graduate school at Duke in the 1980s. He had noticed that most of the research on rape and sexual assault consisted of interviews with victims, who reported almost exclusively acquaintance rape rather than stranger rape, and studies on incarcerated rapists, who were almost exclusively stranger rapists. Lisak became interested in studying the rapists who committed the most common form of rape but who did not get caught and go to prison.
Over a period of 20 years, Lisak surveyed 2,000 male Boston college students, resulting in a landmark study of undetected rapists that was published in 2002. The study began with a questionnaire, and then Lisak allegedly did long follow-up interviews with each respondent. The questions included things like "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?" and "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?" In 2015, Linda M. LeFauve, an Associate Vice President at Davidson College and contributor to Reason Foundation, questioned Lisak about how he conducted follow-up interviews based on responses to an anonymous survey; Lisak refused to comment and hung up the phone.
As with other social science interviews and questionnaires about interpersonal violence, Lisak avoided the use of terms such as "rape," "assault," and "abuse," instead describing in detail the behavior in question, without applying labels that the perpetrators might not identify with. Although the situations described are legally rape, Lisak found the men were not reluctant to talk about them, seeing them as sexual conquests to brag about, and did not think of themselves as rapists; according to Lisak, such men are narcissistic and "like nothing better" than to talk about their "sexual exploits." Approximately 5% of the study participants reported having committed rape.
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