Conceptualizing Consent: Cross-national and Temporal Representations of Sexual Consent in Young Africans’ Creative Narratives on HIV

ABSTRACT

Sexual violence, comprising all non-consensual sexual acts, is an important driver of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Definitions of sexual violence rely on understandings of sexual consent, understood as a feeling of willingness that is communicated via shared indicators of consent. In this paper, through analysis of young authors’ narrative-based social representations, we sought to provide insight into young Africans’ sense-making around sexual consent in order to develop a conceptual framework that can guide future methodological and conceptual work. We analyzed representations of sexual consent in a sample of 291 creative narratives about HIV written for a scriptwriting competition by young Nigerians, Kenyans and Swazis in 2005, 2008, and 2014. We combined thematic data analysis and narrative-based approaches. Narratives represented consent as a feeling of wanting or being willing to have sex, or an intention to have sex, communicated via character actions, conversations, or circumstances. Some narratives depicted characters not wanting but consenting to sex to avoid negative repercussions. Representations of sexual consent were fairly consistent across contexts and over time, although certain representations were more prominent in some country/year samples than others. Results are translated into a conceptual framework that can guide future prevention efforts to reframe sexual consent.

Acknowledgments

Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD085877 (PI: Winskell). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. This research was also supported by the Emory Center for AIDS Research (P30 AI050409) and the Mellon Foundation. We are grateful to Fatim Dia, Georges Tiéndrébéogo, Siphiwe Nkambule-Vilakati, Rob Stephenson and Robert Bednarczyk, and also to research assistants Amy Gregg, Kristina Countryman, Landy Kus, Emily Frost, Kate Scully, Alexandra Piasecki, Ahoua Koné and Tatenda Mangurenje.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R01HD085877]; Emory Center for AIDS Research [P30 AI050409].