Michael Kimmel is a sociologist at the State University of New York who has received international recognition for his work on men and masculinity. He says violent men often view their actions as revenge or retaliation. "They say, women have power over me because they're beautiful and sexual and I want them and they elicit that and I feel powerless," he says. "Just listen for a minute to the way in which we describe women's beauty and sexuality. We describe it as a violence against us. She is a knock-out, a bomb-shell, dressed to kill, a femme fatale, stunning, ravishing. I mean all of these are words of violence against us. It's like, wow, she knocked me out. So the violence then, or the aggression or the sexual violence is often a way to retaliate."

Philip is a 29-year-old man even prison workers at the Utah State Prison say is a charmer. He is serving time for sexually abusing his step-daughter. He says anger over a divorce led to his crime. "I wasn't thinking about her whatsoever, just she was there," he says. "Somebody to vent my anger, my frustrations, and my anxieties and pain. I didn't think about her, and if you ask the majority of people who are here on this same crime, they would tell you probably the same thing. They didn't really think. They just want somebody to vent their anger out on. A lot of people who do sex crimes, do these crimes out of anger. Now sex and anger go hand in hand."

Roby sees several kinds of sex offenders. Those, like Philip, for whom sexual assault is an extension of rage; those who have a need to control of have power over their victims; and those who derive sexual pleasure out of inflicting pain on others. Many of the rapists he's worked with also seem to have been motivated by sex. "Most of the individuals that I've worked with saw having sex with a woman as basically their final validation of them being a man. So they would decide prior to the time they went out and actually committed the rape that they were going to be sexually involved with some woman," he says. "The woman no longer really had a choice to make in that kind of relationship, but I don't think they started out saying what I want to do is to degrade or humiliate some other individual."

Approximately 25-26 percent of the inmate population at the Utah State Prison are sex offenders. Dr. Ron Sanchez is the supervising psychologist who works with them. "I think sex is part of it. I think it's a vehicle for their aggression. There again, it's not just about sex. Many of these individuals, at least on the surface, have relationships with women and are having sex on a regular basis, but for some reason have chosen to go out victimize people in this fashion."

Since the 1970s when Susan Brownmiller published her ground breaking book, "Against our Will," rape has been viewed as a crime of control and violence. But Michael Ghiglieri disagrees. He says men may use violence and force as a tool, but what they're after is sex. "That whole power and control thing as an end in itself is a myth. Power and control is used as an instrument to accomplish a sexual event with an unwilling victim. And to leave out that sexual event is to completely forget what the crime was, which was a copulation was stolen from a woman against her will. To take the motive out of the actual definition is crazy. It essentially places women in a place where they no longer understand the motive of the rapist. It's an immense disservice to women."

While some feminists are adamant that rape is not about sex, Jane Caputi, a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, claims it's specious to separate violence and sex. "I would disagree with some of the early feminists who would say rape is a crime of violence, not a crime of sex. Because, unfortunately, in this culture sex is completely interfused with violence, with notions of dominance and subordination. Our gender roles are constructed so we have these two genders, masculine and feminine, that are defined by one being powerful and one being powerless. So, powerlessness and power themselves become eroticized."

She points to popular culture, which reflects and perpetuates this intertwining of sex and violence. "It makes it glamourous, it eroticizes that kind of violence against women and makes it appear consensual, as if women seek this out and want it," she says. "We all know the notorious General Hospital scene where Luke raped Laura and then later married her and so it made it seem as though rape was a kind of courtship ritual. Gone with the Wind is, of course, classic in that we see a scene of marital rape and the woman is made to smile as if seeming to enjoy it."

The media, biology and culture may be contributing factors, but the majority of men -- those who are the product of the same biology, the same culture -- don't rape women. The causes of individual pathology are far more complicated. To understand rape, it's important to look at the men who rape. According to Ghiglieri, approximately 90 percent of convicted rapists are young men, most of them troubled. Ron Sanchez says sex offenders cut across all racial, economic and social lines. Convicted sex offenders include physicians, truck drivers, utility workers, and teachers, single men and married men with children. Yet Sanchez sees some general patterns. Rapists tend to be antisocial. Many have a mixed criminal history and a pattern of victimizing people. They're aggressive and have problems controlling their anger. They lack adequate communication skills which contributes to their feelings of rage and frustration. They're often sensitive to rejection and insecure about their own masculinity. They also have distorted views about women and sex. Most have been sexually deviant since adolescence.

"Many of the rapists have what we call thinking errors or criminal thinking," where they have a tendency to distort reality," he says. "For instance, they might interpret the way she responds to them in a very friendly manner by saying "Hi", they might interpret that as that they're interested in him, as having sex with him to be blunt."

One thing universally common to rapists is that they don't think about what their victim goes through. "As you can imagine, committing that type of crime against another human being requires a tremendous amount of detachment, of dehumanizing that individual," says Sanchez.

Tony is serving time at the Utah State Prison for sexually abusing his 13-year-old sister-in-law. But he doesn't think it was rape. "I believe she consented but her boyfriend at the time didn't like it," he says. "My mom was a cocktail waitress so I've been around females portraying themselves as sex objects. I seen my mom in her skimpy outfits which that was the type of work she chose. After seeing women like that in magazines, on billboards, and casinos wearing hardly anything, you grow up after 23 years pretty much thinking that's what a lot of these women bring on themselves. They want to be an object. You go to different parts of the country and women don't want to be recognized that way. So I'm a monster here, but yet I'm normal in Nevada."

He admits that his victim didn't deserve what he did to her and calls it a "selfish act on my part," though he minimizes his crime and its impact. "I can't put mine in the same category as a violent crime. Mine wasn't violent. I didn't break in to do the crime. I didn't use a weapon to do my crime. I just used the trust I had in my victim. That was my weapon....She's gettin over it. She's gotten over it. She's movin' on. She's goin' to college. She's doing' good."

Getting at the real motives of rapists is difficult since rapists typically do not admit their crimes. They often find excuses, and experts say they don't always tell the truth. "Rapists rarely want to admit that they raped at all let alone why they might have done it," says Ghiglieri. "Oftentimes, the only confession of these people comes out during rehabilitation programs that they're put through in social services. These rapists will learn what they're supposed to say, which is, 'I'm a victim of society, we live in a macho society that made me the way I am, women are too attractive, and they're not available to me, and it's the woman's fault,' and on and on and on."

So why don't rapists admit their crime? Ghiglieri says it has to do with a very simple fact -- "A man who rapes, among men, is probably the most hated individual that can exist in a male society," he says. "It's actually dangerous to admit that you raped anyone. So men don't admit to rape, even in prison, because of fear of retribution by men who aren't rapists."

Most rapists are never caught, and conviction rates for those apprehended are notoriously low. According to Department of Justice statistics, 48 percent of accused rapists were released before trial. Of those tried, only 54 percent were sentenced to prison. Even more troubling is that the average sex offender may commit hundreds of crimes in his lifetime, which means that the vast majority of rapes go undetected and unpunished.

Ron Sanchez says that during therapy, offenders admit crimes they've committed as children, teenagers and adults -- sometimes disclosing as many as 50 or 60 other crimes, which escalated in seriousness. "Many of them began voyeuring in homes, then eventually escalated to burglaries, even breaking into houses at night while people were sleeping, then escalating to the point of fantasy, fantasies about rape and eventually planning and committing rape."

According to Sanchez, sex offenders tend to be compulsive and repetitive, the kind of criminals who are hardest to treat. A 1989 study by the American Psychological Association found no evidence that the rate of recidivism for treated offenders was any lower than it was for offenders who received no treatment.

"We need to be realistic about what therapy can do," he says. "When we talk about treatment, we're not talking about a disease or an illness that we can cure with an antibiotic or something like that. It boils down to a personal choice." Treatment, he says, can work well for individuals who are motivated and want to change, but it's difficult to treat sex offenders who have been abusing women for a number of years or who have multiple deviancies. Still, Sanchez believes therapy for sex offenders if crucial, if for no other reason than to identify who is not likely to change so that they remain separated from society.

If we are really serious about curbing this kind of violence against women, most experts say the punishment for such crimes must be harsh. "If a rapist gets away scott free or gets away with minor punishment, that means rape is a viable sexual strategy for a large number of men. Rape is inevitable if we don't punish it," says Ghiglieri.

"Everything we know tells us that they only begin to take it seriously when there are very serious consequences," insists Steinem.

Michael Kimmel calls it a matter of carrots and sticks. "I think the stick is we need very strong laws with uncompromising enforcement all the way through the legal system so that we make it clear as culture that we won't stand for this. As a culture we can say the way we try to say around murder for example, or auto theft for example, 'this is beyond the pale, you cannot do this. We will come down so hard on you, you won't want to do this.' O.K. that's the stick. What's the carrot? If we as men make it very clear to the women in our lives that we don't support men's violence against women, that we are actively opposed to it, that we are willing to confront other men who we see doing aggressive things, then our relationships with women will actually improve."

Mary Dickson is the writer and co-producer of the PBS documentary film, No Safe Place: Violence Against Women, produced by Colleen Casto.