A San Jose State graduate student who preferred to go by Danielle for privacy concerns, said she was in her freshman year at the University of California, Los Angeles when she felt her sexual consent with someone was a “gray area.”
Danielle said after returning to her dorm room following a dinner date, she felt she was “sort of convinced” to have sex.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to hook up with him, I did . . . I just wanted to wait a date or so, I don’t know,” Danielle in a Zoom call. “Afterwards, I mean, not like immediately but the next day, I just felt kind of weird about it . . . like I really, I don’t know, I just remember thinking ‘it would have still been nice to wait.’ ”
She said she’s had many friends who’ve also experienced something similar but they “don’t think much about it” most of the time.
Jason Laker, SJSU department of counselor education professor, said he’s been researching sexual consent communication and negotiation since 2012.
Laker said he’s found a prevalent response from college-students when they describe affectionate, relational or sexual experiences: “It just happened.”
He said as there’s obviously more that occurred than that quote, many college students are “mindless” toward sex.
Laker’s research page “Consent Stories” states “it just happened” is a common social convention, whether rooted in a desire to be brief, respectful of private matters or to omit potentially embarrassing or otherwise stressful details.
“This is often how we think about things . . . we often ritualized certain things,” he said in a Zoom call, adding that recalling a sexual encounter for many students is like “waking up” at their desk after falling asleep.
Laker has been co-investigating alongside Erica Boas, SJSU’s subject area coordinator for social science, in their years-long research project: “Sexual Coercion and Violence in College: Reforming Policies and Practices for Consent Education and Personal Agency.”
“Our study is not about sex or sexual activity, it's about how you let it be known what someone wants or doesn't want,” he said.
While their research has been on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic since 2019, Laker and Boas have interviewed hundreds of college students to help them recall their consent experiences.
According to the Consent Stories website, the project is dedicated to: enhancing sexual consent understanding, coercion and assault among college students; identifying prevention and intervention efforts, designing effective prevention education and training programs; and conducting research to evaluate the pilot prevention and intervention efforts’ effectiveness.
Laker said the research method they use in the interviews is akin to a football clip getting reversed, again and again, until the play’s details are retained.
“If you could imagine that, similarly, the encounter from the time that you two met till the time you ended up having sex or in bed, that there had been a camera and that they were going back play by play, just like on the football game, could you help walk us through the details of how it came to that, slow it down,” he said.
Laker said SJSU’s Title IX consent policy, like most college consent policies, include overt ‘yes’ or ‘no’ dialogue as official consent to sex but that’s “not how most people actually do it.”
Graduate student Danielle said she’s been formally asked, “Do you want to have sex?” just twice in her life.
“A majority of the time, it’s like, I’m reading their body language and they’re reading mine . . . we’re teasing each other and I don’t know, it’s usually like we’re on the same page, escalating second by second,” she said.
Laker said not only is it awkward or difficult for many people to overtly ask for consent but in many ways, most people find that it “kills the mood” or is not erotic - it's a turn off.
“There's a real structural barrier,” he said. “How are we supposed to take on the more affirmative, unclear forms of consent requests and responses when we have this social dilemma about being able to even do that at all?”
Laker said sexual consent between college students is predominantly communicated through signals, cues or subtle gestures such as pulling up a partner’s pant leg partway or verbiage that’s maybe intentionally ambiguous.
He said one of the biggest critiques he and Boas have about universities is the primary focus on verbal sexual consent.
“[A college’s] primary focus, and frankly, this is true in the broader society, is about legal and policy lenses to look at this stuff and while laws and policies are important, they are also only a part of what's going on,” Laker said. “If we just go to the question of whether what happened between those two in the bedroom was violating a policy or not . . . no wonder we have such an unsatisfying and further traumatizing situation there.”
He said as for the events of people “giving in” or “trying to get it over with” or having sex because they “feel obliged” - that's coercion, some of which is perpetuated by the partner but some of which also has to do with the broader society and the college atmosphere.
“All this stuff is messy. So it's really important to find potential partners who’re willing to slow it down or be involved in some form of communication about what the two of you, or the five of you, or whatever, agree on,” Laker said. “The consent stories that we share show some creative and circumspect ways for people to navigate that.”
