Using popular media portrayals to investigate undergraduates’ perceptions of sexual consent

ABSTRACT

Sexual assault is sexual activity without consent, but what is consent? Undergraduates’ understandings are often messier than the consensual/non-consensual binary. U.S. university undergraduates watched videos depicting consensual sexual interactions and sexual assaults. Scenes were drawn from popular television programmes and pornographic websites, and varied in their inclusions of verbal consent, alcohol consumption, and coercion. The results show promise for the method of using popular media vignettes to investigate undergraduates’ consent perceptions. Findings illustrate that women who never viewed pornography found the scenes less consensual than men who frequently viewed pornography. Despite U.S. law requiring universities to provide sexual consent education to incoming students, such sexuality education had only limited effects on perceptions of consent. Findings suggest that semester-long educational courses were more effective than one-time trainings in impacting perceptions of consent.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual consent
• sexual assault
• affirmative consent
• vignette
• higher education

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Fall 2017 writing seminar, Myra Ferree, Maria Azócar, Eve Gronert, and Makena Felten.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nona Maria Gronert

Nona Maria Gronert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include gender, law, sexual consent, sexual violence, and higher education. Her dissertation focuses on how the politics of sexual violence at one public university have changed from 1972 through 2017, focusing on activism, legal change, and administrative responses.