‘It’s complicated’: young people’s views on the complexity of asking for consent and the role for sex and relationships education

ABSTRACT

There is emerging evidence that young people have a good understanding of consent as a concept, but this does not align with real world practices. The perspectives of young people on the complexities of enacting consent are lacking, as are their views on the role of sex and relationships education. This study explored the topic of consent with 18 young people aged 14–20 years through interviews conducted in South Australia. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded, with four over-arching themes progressively developed through reflexive thematic analysis. Participants had a sound understanding of consent in the abstract and emphasised the importance of explicit verbal communication; however, consent was unlikely to reflect this in practice. In real-life, consent was embedded in social contexts replete with non-verbal cues, in which gendered sexual scripts dominated sexual interaction. Participants made recommendations for making formal sex and relationships education more relevant and useful.

KEYWORDS:

• Consent
• adolescence
• sex education
• gender
• sexual script theory

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the young people that gave their time to share their thoughts and experiences on this important topic.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research, supporting data is not available.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2024.2317330

Additional information

Funding

SK was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship (https://www.education.gov.au/research-training-program). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.