Sexual consent is one’s voluntary, sober, and conscious willingness to engage in a particular sexual behavior with a particular person within a particular context. Sexual precedent theory posits that ...people believe that engaging in consensual sex at one point in time implies consent to later sexual encounters with that person. By assuming consent once a sexual precedent is set, people may rely less on communication cues. We sought to provide quantitative support for the claim that sexual precedent influences sexual consent in people’s sexual relationships. To capture variability across sexual experiences, we collected daily sexual behavior data from each participant (
n
= 84) over a period of 30 days. We found a curvilinear relationship between sexual history with a partner and how people perceived consent during sexual activity with that partner (
p
= .003, ∆
R
2
= .089). A piecewise regression revealed that participants were less likely to report consent communication cues as sexual precedent increased until about 575 previous sexual behaviors (
p
= .003,
R
2
= .122); after this point, participants were more likely to report consent communication cues as sexual precedent increased (
p
= .028,
R
2
= .179). Overall, we provide the first quantitative evidence that consent conceptualization varies both within the person and across relationships regarding sexual precedent. In our discussion, we emphasize that sexual consent is contextual and cannot be assumed even after previous sexual encounters.
CONTEXT
Affirmative consent standards adopted by colleges and universities are meant to decrease miscommunication that may lead to sexual assault. However, they may not take into account ...sociocultural factors that influence consent. In particular, the role of gender norms needs to be better understood.
METHODS
In‐depth interviews about college students’ sexual activity, including sexual consent communication, were conducted with 17 female and 13 male students at a large southern university during the spring 2013 semester. The interview protocol and analyses were guided by Carspecken's critical qualitative methodology, which seeks to understand both participants’ explicit statements and implied underlying meanings and values. Themes and subthemes were identified through inductive analyses.
RESULTS
Two overarching themes emerged: Students perceived a sexual double standard, and males viewed obtaining sex as a conquest. Subthemes related to the first theme reflected endorsement of traditional views of women's sexuality (the notions that “good girls” do not have sex, that women should privilege men's sexual needs over their own and that women “owe” men sex once men have “worked” for it). Subthemes related to the second theme reflected males’ beliefs that sex is a commodity that pits women and men against one another, and that women can be “convinced” to have sex if they initially refuse.
CONCLUSIONS
College students’ consent communication may be influenced by gender norms that challenge assumptions of affirmative consent standards. Cultural shifts in students’ views of sexuality may be necessary for affirmative consent policies to be effective.
Heterosexual university students continue to endorse sexual scripts that preference men's desire and sustain gendered power imbalances in sexual relationships and encounters, leading women to risk ...pregnancy by engaging in unprotected sex. Because young women also endorse norms encouraging them to protect themselves and their partners from unintended pregnancy, women are caught in a bind between two often competing norms. We conducted semi-structured individual interviews with university women (n = 45) to examine how they navigate these competing norms. We found that women explained risky contraceptive decisions by saying they "just weren't thinking," thus employing strategic ambiguity, or vague language used to maintain social status, to navigate between competing norms. Our findings suggest that women were actually thinking about risks and making calculated decisions in the moment which often privileged men, putting themselves at risk and sometimes causing distress. To save face, women presented the idea that they "just weren't thinking" in different ways that conformed to traditional notions of romance and sexuality: being in the moment, love and trust for their partner, and deferring to the perceived or actual wishes of men. We conclude that there is a need to promote and achieve affirmative sexuality which includes women feeling empowered to express their own sexual needs - whether that be consent or refusal, contraception, pleasure, or all of these.
In 2014, U.S. president Barack Obama announced a White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, noting that "1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their ...time there." Since then, this one-in-five statistic has permeated public discourse. It is frequently reported, but some commentators have criticized it as exaggerated. Here, we address the question, "What percentage of women are sexually assaulted while in college?" After discussing definitions of sexual assault, we systematically review available data, focusing on studies that used large, representative samples of female undergraduates and multiple behaviorally specific questions. We conclude that one in five is a reasonably accurate average across women and campuses. We also review studies that are inappropriately cited as either supporting or debunking the one-in-five statistic; we explain why they do not adequately address this question. We identify and evaluate several assumptions implicit in the public discourse (e.g., the assumption that college students are at greater risk than nonstudents). Given the empirical support for the one-in-five statistic, we suggest that the controversy occurs because of misunderstandings about studies' methods and results and because this topic has implications for gender relations, power, and sexuality; this controversy is ultimately about values.
Headlines publicize controversies about sexual assault among college students, and universities face pressure to revise their sexual consent policies. What can the social science literature ...contribute to this discussion? In this article, we briefly discuss reasons for the recent upsurge in attention to these issues, the prevalence of sexual assault among college students, and aspects of college life that increase the risk of sexual assault and complicate sexual consent. We then review the conceptual challenges of defining sexual consent and the empirical research on how young people navigate sexual consent in their daily lives, focusing primarily on studies of U.S. and Canadian students. Integrating these conceptual issues and research findings, we discuss implications for consent policies, and we present five principles that could be useful for thinking about consent. Finally, we discuss some of the limitations of the existing research and suggest directions for future research.
Sexual consent can be conceptualized as a process of accumulating cues that build toward and continue throughout a consensual sexual encounter. How people perceive the cues of others during this ...process is an important aspect of consent. However, previous research has not investigated the trajectories of people’s consent perceptions throughout such a process. Using a novel staggered vignette protocol, we examined participants’ (
N
= 1218; 64.4% female) perceptions of fictional targets’ sexual consent at 11 time points. We tested latent growth curve models using multilevel structural equation modeling to examine trajectories in consent perceptions over the course of the vignette. We hypothesized that mean differences and rates of change would be associated with several constructs relevant to sexual consent. We found that initial consent perceptions and trends over the course of the vignette varied by whether the participant was a university student, by an alcohol manipulation in the vignette, by the fictional target’s sex, and by type of sexual behavior. Researchers should examine whether our findings on consent perceptions of a fictional vignette extend to people’s actual sexual encounters, including potential associations between the three primary aspects of sexual consent: perceptions, feelings, and communication.
Background
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. HPV can cause genital warts and multiple types of cancers in females. HPV vaccination is ...recommended to youth age 11 or 12 years before sexual initiation to prevent onset of HPV-related diseases. For females who have not been vaccinated previously, catch-up vaccines are recommended through age 26. The extent to which catch-up vaccines are beneficial in terms of disease prevention and cost-effectiveness is questionable given that some women may have been exposed to HPV before receiving the catch-up vaccination. This study aims to examine whether the cutoff age of catch-up vaccination should be determined based on an individual woman’s risk characteristic instead of a one-size-fits-all age 26.
Methods
We developed a microsimulation model to evaluate multiple clinical outcomes of HPV vaccination for different women based on a number of personal attributes. We modeled the impact of HPV vaccination at different ages on every woman and tracked her course of life to estimate the clinical outcomes that resulted from receiving vaccines. As the simulation model is risk stratified, we used extreme gradient boosting to build an HPV risk model estimating every woman’s dynamic HPV risk over time for the lifetime simulation model.
Results
Our study shows that catch-up vaccines still benefit all women after age 26 from the perspective of clinical outcomes. Women facing high risk of HPV infection are expected to gain more health benefits compared with women with low HPV risk.
Conclusions
From a cancer prevention perspective, this study suggests that the catch-up vaccine after age 26 should be deliberately considered.
Beyond the Dyad Jozkowski, Kristen N.
Violence against women,
07/2015, Letnik:
21, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Sexual assault is prevalent in the United States, particularly among college women. Prevention programs are implemented to combat assault, yet rates have not changed for five decades. A course ...designed to deconstruct contextualized factors contributing to assault was developed as an alternative prevention initiative. The current study assessed the effectiveness of the course compared with a traditional program via in-depth interviews with students. Findings indicated that students in the course were more likely to acknowledge underlying determinants of sexual assault and articulate how such behaviors could lead to assault. The course could be an effective approach to sexual assault prevention education.
Sexual consent can be conceptualized as an internal willingness to engage in sexual behavior. To communicate this internal feeling, people use and interpret cues—both active and passive. We proposed ...and tested a model for the potential mechanisms underlying women's sexual consent, which predicted associations between women's internal feelings of consent and the consent cues communicated and interpreted in a given sexual encounter. Because research on sexual consent has consistently urged researchers to collect data from samples that are not primarily college-aged and White, we conducted a pilot systematic review of peer-reviewed sexual consent literature to confirm this need. We then used structural equation modeling to test our proposed model with data from a national sample diverse regarding age and race/ethnicity (n = 589). We found that women's internal consent feelings are associated with their use of active consent cues—especially nonverbal cues. Because passive cues were unrelated to women's internal consent, not resisting or not saying no should not be used to infer women's consent.
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