ABSTRACT
In preliminary studies, behaviours, actions, and cues occurring in social settings (e.g., bars or parties), including the transition to a private setting (e.g., going home together), have been identified as indicating a potential partner’s consent to sexual behaviour. To examine this nuance, we assessed people’s in-the-moment perceptions of sexual consent. We developed staggered vignettes of a fictional sexual encounter between two characters and asked participants (N = 1094) to indicate the extent that they believed the characters were willing to engage in several sexual behaviours. We found that the act of transitioning from a social to a private setting increased participants’ in-the-moment perceptions of the characters’ willingness to engage in genital touching, oral sex, and vaginal-penile sex (ps <.001). We did not find the effect of transitioning to a private setting to vary by the gender of the (1) participant or (2) character initiating the transition. However, we found that male participants indicated that the female character was more likely to be willing to engage in sexual behaviour when the female character initiated the invitation to transition from the social to the private setting. We recommend that educators and advocates emphasise such nuances in consent communication as part of affirmative consent and sexual assault prevention initiatives.
