(Re)Defining Sexual Victimization
An Exploratory Analysis of Non-Classifying Incidents
Reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey
Karen G. Weiss
Department of Sociology
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4356
## email not listed ##
Few crimes in the US elicit as much skepticism and as many conflicting interpretations as
do incidents involving sexual coercion. Studies (Frazier and Seales 1997; Jackson 1995;
Shotland & Goodstein 1983; Weis and Borges 1973; Williams 1984; Quinn 2000) consistently
find that individuals, including the victims themselves, are often reluctant to label certain
sexually coercive situations or unwanted sexual contact as criminal despite conditions that
clearly meet legal definitions that designate them as sexual crimes. For instance, Koss (Koss et
al. 1987; Koss 1988; Koss & Gidycz 1985) found that only 27% of the women in her national
study whose experiences met legal criteria for rape called their own situations rape, and in a more
recent national study on the sexual victimization of college women (Fisher, Cullen & Turner
2000), Bonnie Fisher and colleagues report that still less than half (46.5%) of the women who the
researchers classified as rape victims considered their experiences to be rape.
Such large inconsistencies between researchers’ and respondent’s interpretations of sexual
victimization have ignited much controversy over the years regarding the accuracy of reported
estimates of sexual crimes. Critics (Gilbert 1992, 1993; Paglia 1991; Sommers 1994; Roiphie
1993) allege that violence-against-women researchers (Koss et al. 1987; Schwartz & DeKeseredy
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