Sexual Harassment, Sexual Abuse, and the Serial Offender Personality: Derivations and Predictions from Evolutionary Psychology

What is it about?

Much of our personality is inherited from our family genetics. Evolutionary Psychology informs us of the behaviors, culture, and personalities we have received from our ancestors. In human mating behaviors, females make attractive displays while males make advances. When mating behaviors are imposed on the unwilling, they become sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is not exclusive to males. Both males and females are capable of sexually harassment; males by imposing an advance, females by imposing a display. About 9% of males and 4% of females have personalities prone to sexually harass. About 0.5% of males and 0.2% of females are prone toward felony crime including sexual assault. Most sexual harassment and sexual assault, and most felony crime, is committed by serial abusers coming from these small populations. However, the inherited propensity to harassment, or even toward criminal behavior, can be brought under control by focused self-improvement. With this new knowledge and deeper understanding of sexual harassment, one can hope for more clarity in its research and in its control, and a more informed justice in policy and adjudication.

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Why is it important?

Prior to this work there was no scientific and objective definition of sexual harassment. Working definitions were volatile and almost arbitrary. This caused confusion in research into sexual harassment and unfairness in its legal adjudication. The new science-based definition of sexual harassment -- abusively imposed evolutionarily endogenous mating behaviors -- should bring clarity to its study and justice to its adjudication, solving what were persistent and serious problems.

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