Key Themes in Community Participants' Definitions of Sexual Consent and Their Association with Sexual Consent Attitudes and Behaviours

Sexual consent, or the communication of willingness to participate in sex, is crucial in all sexual interactions. Whereas educators and researchers emphasize an ideal of consent (i.e., "affirmative" consent), lay practices of consent rarely conform to this ideal. In this mixed-methods online study (N = 231), we investigated participants' spontaneous conceptualizations of consent, gender differences in sexual consent conceptualizations, and relations of those conceptualizations to measures of sexual consent attitudes and behaviours. There was considerable variation in the complexity of participants' definitions, which reflected seven core behavioural themes. Certain themes (e.g., articulation of boundaries, consent as a process) aligned with affirmative consent attitudes, but others (e.g., consent as internal desire, lack of coercion) did not. The results suggest that participants have a sophisticated spontaneous understanding of consent, with specific areas that differ from the affirmative consent view. Further, the results suggest some aspects of affirmative consent may not be relevant to all audiences. We discuss the implications of these findings for engaging audiences in sexual consent educational initiatives.