We explore the paths related to college men’s involvement in all-male antirape prevention groups using in-depth interviews conducted with twenty-five male college students who are active members of such groups from eleven campuses located on the East Coast of the United States. Major themes deriving from analysis of the interviews were all related to the engagement of the participants with the programs on four different levels. These themes, which are developmentally related, are (1) a disclosure which makes sexual assault a personal issue at the same time that it reveals a lack of knowledge and skills on the part of the respondents, (2) the evaluation of the approach of individual programs, (3) the evaluation of the relative effectiveness of the approacher, and (4) the creation of a social context which the engagement facilitates. Overall, we find that when the men in our study were approached in a nonconfrontational, alliance-building fashion by other men, they reported that their knowledge related to sexual assault, their empathy toward sexual assault survivors, and their motivation to actively engage in the prevention of sexual violence all increased. Thus, we see evidence of a pathway to behavioral change represented by the recruitment and participation of men to these programs.
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