Athletic participation, fraternity membership, and date rape: The question remains - Self-selection or different causal processes?

This commentary discusses the papers in a special issue that addresses the contribution of athletic participation and fraternity membership to the prediction of date rape on campus. The commentary focuses on issues that make it difficult to weigh the available evidence, including methodological and conceptual problems, and concludes that the field is currently unable to answer definitively whether athletes and fraternity members, compared to other men, are more sexually aggressive in general, at some locations but not others, or are similar in overall rates of sexual aggression but favor different forms of coercive sexuality. It is suggested that future research address the relative contribution of individual determinants, self-selection into social groups, and features of the environment and culture created by and reciprocally influencing athletes and fraternity members. Such studies are a high priority because of the important practical significance of their findings on shaping prevention programs for date rape on campus.