The Complexities of Sexual Consent Among College Students: A Conceptual and Empirical Review

Abstract

Headlines publicize controversies about sexual assault among college students, and universities face pressure to revise their sexual consent policies. What can the social science literature contribute to this discussion? In this article, we briefly discuss reasons for the recent upsurge in attention to these issues, the prevalence of sexual assault among college students, and aspects of college life that increase the risk of sexual assault and complicate sexual consent. We then review the conceptual challenges of defining sexual consent and the empirical research on how young people navigate sexual consent in their daily lives, focusing primarily on studies of U.S. and Canadian students. Integrating these conceptual issues and research findings, we discuss implications for consent policies, and we present five principles that could be useful for thinking about consent. Finally, we discuss some of the limitations of the existing research and suggest directions for future research.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nicole Lopez, Zachary Bean, Terra Brockman, William Kearney, and Robert Faaborg for their ideas, recently and in past decades.

Notes

¹ Saying “I consent” could be conceptualized as an example of what philosopher John Austin (1962) called “a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, ‘a performative’” (p. 6). Performative speech does more than just describe something; it actually does something. Similar to other performatives, such as saying “I bet …,” “I promise …,” “I name this ship …,” or “I give and bequeath … ” (pp. 5, 9), saying “I consent” performs an act; in this case, it performs the act of giving express consent.

² Interpreting the results of these studies is complicated because, in the sexual consent scales they used, (a) some subscales have different names but similar content and (b) some subscales have the same name but different content. Three of these scales have subscales that reflect not resisting: the No Response Signals subscale (Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1999); the SSSCS No Resistance subscale (Beres et al., 2004), and the ECS Passive Behavior subscale (Jozkowski, Sanders, et al., 2014). In addition, two of the scales have a No Response subscale, but one (from Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1999) reflects not resisting and the other (from the ECS) reflects being totally passive. Because of these inconsistencies, we refer to the constructs that they reflect—not resisting and being totally passive—rather than to the subscale names.

³ More precisely, such questions are asking the participants about the probability of engaging in these behaviors, given that they are trying to communicate their consent, or prob (the behavior | trying to communicate consent).