People perceive transitioning from a social to a private setting as an indicator of sexual consent

ABSTRACT

In preliminary studies, behaviours, actions, and cues occurring in social settings (e.g., bars or parties), including the transition to a private setting (e.g., going home together), have been identified as indicating a potential partner’s consent to sexual behaviour. To examine this nuance, we assessed people’s in-the-moment perceptions of sexual consent. We developed staggered vignettes of a fictional sexual encounter between two characters and asked participants (N = 1094) to indicate the extent that they believed the characters were willing to engage in several sexual behaviours. We found that the act of transitioning from a social to a private setting increased participants’ in-the-moment perceptions of the characters’ willingness to engage in genital touching, oral sex, and vaginal-penile sex (ps <.001). We did not find the effect of transitioning to a private setting to vary by the gender of the (1) participant or (2) character initiating the transition. However, we found that male participants indicated that the female character was more likely to be willing to engage in sexual behaviour when the female character initiated the invitation to transition from the social to the private setting. We recommend that educators and advocates emphasise such nuances in consent communication as part of affirmative consent and sexual assault prevention initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual consent
• sexual assault
• gender
• communication
• vignette
• rape myth acceptance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Consent: It’s Simple as Tea’ is a short, animated video, from the United Kingdom promoting the notion that asking for consent is as ‘simple’ as asking someone if they would like a cup of tea.

2. We also manipulated presence of alcohol and whether the characters knew each other. Because these manipulations did not have an effect on the progression of participants’ consent perceptions over the course of the vignette and were not relevant to the present study’s research question, the conditions were collapsed for the following analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristen N. Jozkowski

Kristen N. Jozkowski is the William L. Yarber Endowed Professor in Sexual Health in the Department of Applied Health Science in the School of Public Health-Bloomington at Indiana University. Her research focuses on sexual violence prevention and sexual consent and refusal communication.

Malachi Willis

Malachi Willis is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Psychology at the University of Greenwich. He primarily researches the nuances of sexual consent.