Male partners' attachment styles as predictors of women's coerced first sexual intercourse in Chinese college students' dating relationships

Abstract

Attachment theory has great potential to help our understanding of the apparent contradiction between violence and intimacy. Yet very few studies applied this theory to explain or predict sexual coercion in the context of intimate relationships. This study examined the relation between male partners’ attachment styles and women’s coerced first sexual intercourse in dating relationships. There were 927 valid questionnaires collected by purposive snowball sampling in five main cities in China to college students who were currently in a romantic relationship. Results showed that in both male and female samples, male partners’ anxious attachment style were significantly and positively predicted emotional manipulation coercive tactics. In the female sample, male partners’ two attachment styles (anxious and avoidant) positively predicted violence threat tactics, and male partners’ avoidant attachment style positively predicted defection threat tactics. The research hypothesis of this study has been successfully supported, and implications and limitations were discussed.