Consent, wantedness, and pleasure: Three dimensions affecting the perceived stress of and judgements of rape in sexual encounters.

Abstract

Participants conflate consent and wantedness when judging situations as rape (Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007). Pleasure might also affect how such situations might be appraised by victims, perpetrators, and jurors. In four experiments, participants read vignettes describing sexual encounters that were consensual or not, wanted or unwanted, and pleasurable or not pleasurable. Participants judged whether they thought each situation described rape and how distressing they thought the encounter would be. Wantedness affected perceived distress when consent was given. Wantedness and pleasure also influenced whether participants considered the situation rape in nonconsensual scenarios. In additional experiments, we analysed the results by gender, manipulated perspective (being the subject or initiator of the encounter), levels of aggression, and compared the results to a group of participants who had viewed an anti-abuse campaign. Male participants and those higher in benevolent sexism were more likely than women to utilise pleasure and wantedness in judging whether situations described rape. Perspective and viewing the media campaign did not significantly affect judgements of rape. Our results have implications for models of the consequences of consent, wantedness, and pleasure of sex, and important implications for educational programmes aimed at reducing sexual assault and training for those involved in criminal justice.

Understanding How University Students Use Perceptions of Consent, Wantedness, and Pleasure in Labeling Rape

“…While the data presented by Hills et al (2020) are interesting, the quantitative results do not explain why participants used other features in rating sexual scenarios as rape and whether they used sexual scripts to interpret the scenarios. Indeed, all Hills et al can provide is ratings that may or not link to actual behavior: qualitative responses are more likely to provide better links to attitudes and behaviors.…”

“…Twenty-four vignettes developed by Hills et al (2020) were used for this study: 12 were consensual and 12 were non-consensual: They are available at https ://doi.org/10.1037/xap00 00221 . The scenarios were constructed based on the guidelines presented by Barter and Renold (1999).…”

“…They were comparable in length and structure and content to those asked in a large scale YouGov survey (YouGov, 2018). When asked if they show consent or not, participants are able to determine this accurately (see Hills et al, 2020). Each is a short (two-to threesentence) hypothetical sexual scenarios between acquaintances: None of them described any explicit imagery or words but rather focused on the build up to the sex (sex was not defined within the scenarios to allow participants to interpret this within their own script).…”

“…Consent can be conceptualized as either present or absent (with sex in the latter case being rape). However, some researchers consider consent to be more of a scale (Panichas, 2001) and this may reflect how people view consent (Hills et al, 2020). Alternatively, typologies of consent suggest that it may reflect an internal state of willingness, explicit statements of willingness, and behaviors that may indicate willingness (Muehlenhard, Humphreys, Jozkowski, & Peterson, 2016).…”

“…In a recent study by Hills et al (2020), a set of sexual scenarios between acquaintances were created that systematically manipulated consent, wantedness and pleasure. These were given to participants to rate how much they reflected the participants' own definitions of rape (using a scalar judgment or a binary decision).…”