Moving Beyond Abstracted Empiricism: Pursuing New Sociological Directions in Theorizing Male-to-Female Sexual Assault on University/College Campuses

The social scientific study of sexual assault on North American university/college campuses started in 1957 with a path-breaking survey conducted by Clifford Kirkpatrick and Eugene Kanin. However, it was not until the late 1980s that the interdisciplinary literature in the field started to mushroom. Nevertheless, theoretical developments have not kept pace with the burgeoning empirical body of knowledge in the field. In fact, the current state of scholarly work is now dominated by what the late C. Wright Mills referred to as abstracted empiricism (e.g., research divorced from theory). The main objective of this paper is twofold: (1) to explain how gendered sociological theoretical offerings, especially feminist perspectives, became marginalized and (2) to suggest new sociological directions in explaining male-to-female sexual assaults in institutions of higher learning.