Safety strategies, status positioning and gendered double standards: adolescents’ narratives of sexualised risk in alcohol intoxication contexts

Abstract

ABSTRACT In adolescence, drinking in party settings represents socialisation and fun but also a red zone for sexual assaults. Expanding current knowledge of sexual assault as a systemic attack, this article investigates how adolescents understand and navigate sexualised risk in alcohol intoxication contexts. Using a narrative lens and interviews with 95 15- to 19-year-olds in Norway, we found that adolescents linked drinking to the risk of total loss of control and, specifically for girls, to experiencing sexual assaults. Based on peer- and media-circulated stories, sexualised risk in drunken settings was a pervasive master narrative that shaped girls’ risk understandings and behaviours in ways that spoke to a gendered risk regime. To navigate drunken settings, girls described individual and social safety strategies that underscored the importance of being in control. Notably, lower-status girls, in contrast to higher-status girls, often lacked the social resources that enabled collective safety strategies. In general, girls’ quest for control appeared double-edged—it limited sexual assault risk but also intruded on their freedom, formed basis for moral judgement and reproduced gendered double standards for adolescents’ drinking and sexual practices. Because social status also intersected in girls’ risk management, this gendered risk regime particularly amplifies vulnerability in lower-status girls.