Sexual consent is an understudied and undertheorized concept despite its importance to feminist researchers and activists interested in sexual violence. Literature on consent, although sparse, has been produced from a variety of disciplines, including law, psychology, and sociology. This article is a critical review of current literature and current understandings of sexual consent. Different conceptualizations of consent are analysed including implicit and explicit definitions from legal theorists and sexual violence and consent researchers. Alternatives, including communicative sexuality, are discussed and feminist understandings of the social context of consent and the social forces that produce understandings of consent are examined. Directions for future research are suggested.

Miscommunication theory suggests that many incidents of heterosexual sexual violence or coercion are the result of a miscommunication between men and women. Two most commonly cited forms of miscommunication include men overestimating women's interest in sex and women giving token resistance to sex. The current study is a thematic analysis of the ways that young women and men talked about their casual sex experiences with particular attention to the presence or absence of miscommunication in their descriptions. Both women and men used a combination of three themes to describe their communication with their casual partners: (1) tacit knowing, (2) refusing sex and (3) active participation. Women and men described similar communication mechanisms and reported communicating and understanding their partners' communication whether this involved acceptance or rejection of a sexual invitation. Both men and women demonstrated literacy in the same communicative tools, thus suggesting the absence of miscommunication.

Sexual violence prevention has shifted from centering around a message of 'no means no' toward a message of 'get consent.' This paper explores how young adults conceptualise consent in relation to how they talked about expressing a willingness to participate in sex. The analysis here argues that understandings of consent are disconnected from how young people understand communication about sex. Consent is viewed as a formal minimum requirement for 'ok' sex. At the same time, young people were more sophisticated when discussing how they understand and communicate a willingness to have sex. Implications for sexual violence prevention education and research on sexual consent are discussed.

Consent is a key issue in defining sexual coercion yet few researchers have analyzed sexual consent attitudes and behaviors and, to date, there has been no published research examining sexual consent within same-sex relationships. The main objective of this study was to identify which behaviors people use to ask for and to indicate sexual consent to their same-sex partner(s). A Same-Sex Sexual Consent Scale was developed to measure both initiating and responding consent behaviors in same-sex relationships. Data were collected using an on-line survey from 257 participants (127 men, 130 women). The participants reported using nonverbal behaviors significantly more frequently than verbal behaviors to indicate consent. Exploratory factor analysis for the Initiating and Responding subscales resulted in four factors for each subscale. The four factors for the Initiating Subscale were nonverbal behaviors involving touch, no resistance behaviors, verbal behaviors, and nonverbal behaviors without touch. The factors for the Responding Subscale were no resistance behaviors, verbal behaviors, nonverbal behaviors, and undressing behaviors. There were no significant differences in the initiating behaviors used by men who have sex with men (MSM) and women who have sex with women (WSW); however, when responding to initiating behavior, MSM reported using significantly more nonverbal signals than did WSW. The scale that was developed in this study should be useful for other researchers who wish to study the topic of sexual consent.

No abstract