Courtesy of Claire Harwell

The psychologist David Lisak is an expert on violent crime, including murder and rape. He taught courses on the subject at the University of Massachusetts for 22 years, while working as a forensic consultant to universities, the U.S. military and law enforcement officials. He has worked on hundreds of criminal cases.

Dr. Lisak, 58, became a consultant to the United States Air Force Academy after a sexual assault scandal there in 2003. He works with military commanders and officers to educate them about sexual violence and its causes.

India Ink spoke with him after the gang rape of a young woman in Delhi this week, asking about what motivates men to attack women and what governments and law-enforcement officials can do to try to curb these attacks. Dr. Lisak emphasized that he has no expertise in India but said that many aspects of this subject, including power struggles and aggression, are part of the universal human condition.

Q.

Very simply, why does rape, and particularly gang rape, happen?

A.

There is plenty of evidence from historical texts, the Bible and myths, back into the farthest reaches of history, that tell us that rape has been around and a part of human culture for a very long time.

Human aggression is a very salient part of who human beings are, and especially males. There is clearly a gender difference in level of aggression and how it manifests itself. Look at chimpanzees; you see a much higher level of aggression among the males than the females.

Q.

This is an act of aggression, not a sexual act, correct?

A.

It is occurring in a sexual arena, but equally and clearly in most cases, in the vast majority of cases we have insight into, there are very powerful motivators behind sexual aggression. At the top of the list is power, a feeling of being able to dominate and control another human being, to force them to do something against their will that you want.

Another ingredient in that soup is anger. In the cases I study, you sometimes have someone who is seething with anger. But more often it is more reactive — “I want something, and I am entitled to get what I want, and if you thwart me it really makes me angry.”

There is a reason that you hear over and over again that power and anger are the primary motivations behind sexual violence.

Is it a completely random event that it occurs in the sexual arena? No. Sex has all kinds of meanings, and for a lot of these men, sexuality comes to define how they view themselves. If their sense of efficacy and competence as a man is threatened, it’s a way of restoring their masculinity and efficacy.

If a culture provides a lot of messages like “If you’re a successful man, women will fall all over you,” men that grow up there may feel emasculated, or angry, when that doesn’t happen.

Still, it is a small proportion of men who commit these crimes.

Q.

What’s the proportion?

A.

I can’t really generalize with any confidence. In college populations in the United States, maybe 5 percent, and only 3 percent are committed repeat offenders.

We have some reason to believe that rape might be higher in the military, because there is research with Navy recruits, but we can’t generalize.

Q.

What happens when groups of men get together?

A.

Groups of individuals can be far more positive or far more negative, that’s the nature of group dynamics. If we’re all walking down the street and see something happening that is bad, and one person says we need to intervene, and they turn to another and say “Will you help me?” then you have all these people doing this very positive thing. But there is often the case there is someone, maybe accidentally, or maybe with negative or evil intent, who shifts a group into a negative dynamic.

If you have a group of men, all of whom have various levels of frustration in their lives, and who feel powerless and angry for the things that are not going well in their lives — if you have one person in that group who begins to provide the group with an outlet and a target, like, “Well, those women are getting good jobs, and we’re not. Why are they getting good jobs?” then that can lead to violence.

If they’re in a culture where there are a lot of messages about the entitled role of men, the culture can provide some very ready scripts for violence.

Women historically have been denigrated and objectified and viewed as the property of males around the world. It is only in the last several decades that our laws in the United States have come to reflect a different reality, and in many societies around the world it is still the case. To the extent any culture has those kinds of messages out there, that provides fertile ground for angry individuals to target individuals who are vulnerable.

Q.

Is premeditation often part of a sexual attack that involves a group?

A.

Yes, it is. It is not to say that they don’t occur opportunistically. It’s not that every time there is one, a group of men have met at 6 p.m. and said “We are going to go gang-rape someone,” but that does happen. If all the ingredients mix together, say men find themselves at a fraternity party, in the U.S., where there is a young freshman woman new to campus and new to alcohol who is unconscious, these men see an opportunity.

It’s the last ingredient in the gang rape about to happen, simply that the opportunity is there.

Q.

It is very difficult to fathom how anyone could get into a group situation where they say “Okay, let’s go do this!” when the “this” is physically or sexually attack one person. How does that happen?

A.

All I can say is there is nothing new about human beings targeting a vulnerable group. Let’s go to Nazi Germany – let’s say you have a group of brownshirts at a beer hall, they’ve absorbed all the messages like “It’s the Jews who are the reasons we don’t have jobs,” and they say “Let’s go get us one.” They look for someone walking home from the synagogue and they lay into them. That’s been going on around the world forever, you can replace “Nazi” and “Jew” and we’re not talking about much difference.

Rape is a particular form of violence, but other than that it is not that much different. If you have gangs of men going out and looking for women who are vulnerable and singling them out, that’s not much different than gay-bashing or anything else.

There is one question that needs to be answered: Why are these men viewing women as the people they are motivated to and feel entitled to target?

I think sometimes the sexual element clouds our understanding of what rape is. Fundamentally, it is targeting a group of people they hold hate for.

Q.

So these men hate women?

A.

Yes, there has always been a powerful argument for viewing a lot of sexual violence as a hate crime.

Q.

What would your advice be to the Indian government or law officials trying to curb these crimes?

A.

The military here in the United States is facing something similar.

The response has to be on multiple levels. First, there’s the safety of individuals — you need a criminal-justice response, you need to be more successful at capturing and prosecuting criminals to send a message, “This is criminal behavior that will be punished.”

Then you have to look at why groups of men are doing this. If the Delhi government asked me what to do, I’d say, “Someone has to start talking to these men, or men like these men, and finding out why they view women as targets.” Why do they feel entitled to? What is the basis for their hatred?

This is the much more difficult challenge. Just as the military is now really starting to grapple with profound elements of the military culture, and it is very painful to do this self-evaluation, you begin to identify aspects of the culture that are feeding this. Then you talk about it.

It is obvious that women around the world are viewed as vulnerable and as legitimate targets for hatred and the exercise of power. A culture has to examine why that is and how it came to be and how it can be changed.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.