Sexual Frustration and Sexual Assault Among Higher Education Students in France

For decades, psychologists and criminologists have demonstrated a causal link between frustration and aggressive behaviors. However, the relevance of the theoretical model of frustration-aggression to sexual assault has not been definitively demonstrated and the possible association between sexual frustration and sexual assault has yet to be empirically tested on a broad scale. In this study based on a large national sample of French higher education students (N = 54,437), we hypothesized that sexual frustration would be associated with perpetration of sexual assault. Results confirmed an association between self-reported sexual frustration and sexual violence toward persons of the opposite sex, even after accounting for hostility towards the opposite sex (i.e., misogyny, misandry). Among men, sexual frustration was associated with higher odds of self-reported attempted sexual assaults (OR = 1.46) and completed sexual assaults (OR = 1.53). Among women, sexual frustration was similarly associated with higher odds of self-reported attempted sexual assaults (OR = 1.49) and completed sexual assaults (OR = 1.94). However, effects sizes confirmed that predicting which individuals attempted or committed sexual assault requires knowing far more than their level of sexual frustration. Overall, our results support the relevance of the frustration-aggression framework in the domain of sexual violence and we discuss the importance of using a large sample to detect such effects.