Food and Alcohol Consumption and Experiences (FACE) Study

Alcohol-involved sexual violence (SV) is a common and detrimental experience for young adult women. To supplement SV prevention strategies aimed at perpetrators of SV–who always assume full responsibility for the occurrence of SV–risk reduction programs that target women’s drinking have been developed and implemented. While promising, these programs have limited efficacy, and research that examines novel predictors of women’s SV victimization using innovative approaches is needed to address the limitations of these risk reduction programs and associated research. It is commonly advised that people eat a calorie-rich meal ahead of a night of drinking to prevent adverse alcohol-related consequences. However, sociocultural pressures to approximate a thin body type and to drink alcohol in social settings encourage women to do the opposite: to engage in compensatory behaviors (e.g., restricted eating, excessive exercise) on drinking days to offset calories consumed from alcohol or to enhance alcohol’s intoxicating effects. This behavior is known as Food and Alcohol Disturbance (FAD; Choquette et al., 2018), and nearly one in two young adult women (~45%) engage in FAD behaviors (Eisenberg & Fitz, 2014; Giles et al., 2009). Indeed, women who engage in FAD behaviors are significantly more likely to binge drink and become intoxicated than women who do not (Lupi et al., 2017; Giles et al., 2009). Among other negative outcomes that have been investigated (e.g., getting injured, blacking out), it is likely that women who engage in FAD behaviors and frequently become more intoxicated are at an increased risk of experiencing SV because of their proximity to perpetrators, but no studies to date have examined this possibility.