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Fifty-four male undergraduates (average age of 19.2, 74% Caucasian, 13% Asian American, 9% Hispanic, and 4% African American) participated in a rape prevention education program in which they listened to an audiotape of a man versus woman describing the experience of being raped (or they listened to no such audiotape). Two weeks later, the students who heard the female tape reported more likelihood to engage in rape-supportive behaviors but no difference in empathy or rape supportive attitudes.
In response to research documenting the high incidence of campus rape (Bogal-Allbritten & Allbritten, 1985; Campus Crime Prevention Programs, 1984; Fitzgerald et al., 1996; Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987; Lott, Reilly, & Howard, 1982; Makepeace, 1981; Sweet, 1985), universities have exerted an unprecedented effort to provide preventive educational programming. This proliferation of intervention has been supported not only by the mandate that all federally funded campuses must sponsor such programming (Heppner, Humphrey, HillenbrandGunn, & DeBord, 1995), but also by legislation enacted in at least one state that requires all universities to provide sexual assault education to students during freshman orientation (Schuster, 1993).
Despite this laudable effort to provide rape prevention education on college campuses, one commonly cited concern is that such programs often fail to involve those who would benefit most from participation (Anderson, Cooper, & Okamura, 1997; Briskin & Gary, 1986; Ring & Kilmartin, 1992; Rosenthal, Heesacker, & Neimeyer, 1995; Schewe & O'Donohue, 1993; Simon, 1993). For example, although the vast majority of campus sexual assaults are perpetrated by male rather than female students, only a few programs have been designed and implemented exclusively for men. Another concern stems from the fact that very few of the programs for male participants have been subject to any kind of systematic evaluation (Lonsway, 1996; Schewe & O'Donohue, 1993). For example, some programs for men have been declared "successful" based solely on measures of participant satisfaction (Egidio & Robertson, 1981; Ring & Kilmartin, 1992). Other programs that have been evaluated have reportedly facilitated both a decrease in men's endorsement of rape-supportive attitudes (Gilbert, Heesacker, & Gannon, 1991; Intons-Peterson, RoskosEwoldsen, Thomas, Shirley, & Blut, 1989; Lee, 1987) and desirable change in judgments of rape victims or perpetrators (Intons-Peterson et al., 1989). In contrast, no change has been reported in willingness...