http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/health/when-rapists-weapon-is-a-drug.html 2014-12-09 00:16:55 When a Rapist’s Weapon is a Drug Researchers attempt to answer why someone who has seemingly easy access to consensual sex resorts to drugging. === He had money, charisma, movie star looks and no apparent reason to drug his sexual partners. But he did it anyway, according to multiple accusers, who remember little except losing consciousness and waking up partly dressed and molested. That case — of Andrew Luster, a cosmetics heir convicted in 2003 in Ventura County, Calif., of raping three women after dosing them with a date-rape drug — is distinct from comedian Yet the stories the men’s accusers tell raise an overarching question: Why would someone who has seemingly easy access to consensual sex resort to drugging? That answer is particularly urgent today, with date-rape incidents involving drugs like gamma hydroxybutyrate ( Alcohol is still by far the most commonly used drug in sexual assaults, implicated in 40 to 60 percent of reported cases, Women have told of being dosed by dates, by strangers at parties, by bartenders. Many parents and campus counselors warn young women to watch not only their drinking but their drinks — and not to leave them unattended. “It’s easy to talk about dosing women as a part of some continuum of behavior, but it’s not,” said James Cantor, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the editor in chief of the journal Sexual Abuse. “There are very different motives involved, depending on the person and the context.” One of those motives is obvious: simple opportunism, the reason men have spiked women’s drinks (or less commonly, women men’s) since the dawn of cocktail hour. Another is coercion; the perpetrator is aroused by domination, forcing his (or rarely, her) sexual will on the target. “This is common enough that we debated whether to include it as a diagnosis in the D.S.M. 5,” psychiatrists’ influential diagnostic manual, said Dr. Michael First, a Columbia psychiatrist who edited it. But the idea was shelved, in part because of concerns that doing so would give rapists added recourse in legal cases, he said. A third and far less common motive is a rare kind of “paraphilia"— an unusual sexual preference that becomes compulsive. “In this case, it’s a preference for unresponsive partners,” Dr. Cantor said. Psychiatrists generally divide paraphilias into two groups: those focused on objects, like a foot fetish, and those focused on behaviors, like exhibitionism, voyeurism or frottage, arousal from touching or rubbing against a stranger. A preference for unconscious partners falls in the behavior category. The sex researcher John Money of Johns Hopkins University labeled this “somnophilia,” or sleeping princess syndrome, and described it as a sexual fetish “of the marauding-predatory type in which erotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and dependent on intruding upon” an unresponsive partner, and sometimes waking the person. Women who have been drugged sometimes remember fragments of the assault, and sometimes nothing at all. Psychiatrists know virtually nothing about how the urge to drug and rape someone develops, and perpetrators rarely talk about it. The cases are so rare that no one has published a study on the behavior On a videotape Mr. Luster made that was released during his court proceedings and described in The Los Angeles Times, he is perched on the edge of a bed with a woman passed out behind him. He says to the camera: “Some people dream about Christmas, Thanksgiving, getting together with friends ... I dream about this ...a strawberry blond, a beautiful girl, passed out on my bed and basically there for me to do whatever I choose.” If such urges are like most stemming from other paraphilias, they would emerge early on, as people reach sexual maturity, and would rarely go away. Doctors have tried various forms of psychotherapy and medications to reduce, for example, pedophilic urges, an adult’s sexual desire for children, without much success. “There are occasional claims for treatment, but no one has presented meaningful, compelling evidence that someone with a paraphilia can be turned into someone without a paraphilia,” Dr. Cantor said. “As far as we can tell, it’s like sexual orientation.” Often enough, therapists say, people with such sexual preferences can learn to integrate those into a healthy, consensual relationship — sadomasochism, for instance, bondage, or foot fetishes. But those cases are by definition not paraphilias. It is a diagnosis only when the preference causes “significant impairment,” or when the individual “acts on these sexual urges with a nonconsenting person.”