Abstract
Campus sexual assault is a pervasive issue impacting the well-being, quality of life, and education of all students. There have been many recent efforts to prevent and address campus sexual assault, most notably the adoption of affirmative consent standards. (1) Efforts to address sexual assault on college campuses through an affirmative consent standard could be undermined by traditional gender norms, sexual scripts, and the power dynamics inherent in heterosexual relations, which lead to situations in which many women provide consent to unwanted sex. (2) Studies indicate that college women are likely to experience verbal sexual coercion, yet research has failed to come to a consensus on how to define, operationalize, and study verbal sexual coercion. (3) Research on sexual consent is also lacking, in particular as it relates to consent to unwanted sex as a result of the presence of verbal sexual coercion. (4) This article discusses how multiple forms of unwanted sex can be conceptually examined. (5) Policy implications and areas for future research are discussed.
Highlights
Campus sexual assault (CSA) is a pervasive social problem widely known by college administrators, educators, law enforcement, government, and, most of all, students
(1) Efforts to address sexual assault on college campuses through an affirmative consent standard could be undermined by traditional gender norms, sexual scripts, and the power dynamics inherent in heterosexual relations, which lead to situations in which many women provide consent to unwanted sex
Despite scholars moving in the direction of attempting to examine broader forms of sexual victimization and perpetration tactics, sexual coercion is understudied [56], producing definitions and operationalizations of sexual coercion that suffer from lack of consistency and theoretical conundrums [38,57,58,59]
Summary
Campus sexual assault (CSA) is a pervasive social problem widely known by college administrators, educators, law enforcement, government, and, most of all, students. Affirmative consent has been proposed as a way to remedy the issues with consent and to empower women and men in a dialogue of “communicative sexuality”, meaning that the sexual initiator (typically the man [12,13,14,15]) has to obtain verbal permission for each sex act from the person they are pursuing [16,17,18,19,20] This effectively shifted sexual assault policy from a no-means-no standard to a yes-means-yes standard [20]. In a substantial number of heterosexual encounters on college campuses, women’s choice to willingly engage in sex is thwarted many times because not all initiators take no for an answer This begs the question as to whether an affirmative consent standard, which hinges entirely on providing women with that choice, would be effective in reducing, preventing, or responding to instances of sexual assault on college campuses [22,23]. The main points of this paper are outlined below in
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