Estimate of the prevalence of drug-facilitated sexual assault in the United States

The term drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) has been recently coined to describe victims who were given a drug by an assailant and subsequently sexually assaulted. Previous studies that have attempted to determine the prevalence of drugs in sexual assault complainants have had serious biases. This thesis was designed to better estimate the prevalence of DFSA and to examine the social aspects surrounding it.; Four clinics were provided with sexual assault kits and asked to enroll sexual assault complainants. Subjects provided two urine specimens, a hair specimen and completed a questionnaire describing the assault, as well as any drugs they were using. The three specimens were then analyzed to evaluate the self-reporting of illegal drugs and the number of drugs found in the subjects. Following this analysis, the results were combined with the subject's account of the assault and evaluated as to whether DFSA was a possibility.; A total of 144 subjects were enrolled and the drugs analyzed for were found in 61.8% of the subjects with 4.9% positive for the classic "date-rape" drugs. For the evaluation of the validity of self-reporting of drug use, three drugs were employed; marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamines. We hypothesized that sexual assault complainants would be more truthful in their reporting than other populations studied. However, in this study, subjects' positive for these drugs reported their usage approximately 40% of the time.; DFSA was evaluated for each subject based on criteria developed for this work. In this study, 4.2% of the subjects were evaluated as to have been victims of DFSA through surreptitious drugging. When voluntary drug use by the subject is included, 35.4% of our subjects were estimated to have been victims of DFSA. The true value of DFSA for our subjects is most likely to be between these two estimates. This work is the first to include toxicological analyses with the subject's statements to determine DFSA.