Optional or Obligatory? Exploring Undergraduate University Students’ Attitudes, Opinions, and Beliefs Around Verbal Sexual Consent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: For the last 20 years, sexual assault on university campuses has occurred at epidemic levels. This may be caused by undergraduate students primarily using non-verbal cues to communicate sexual consent, despite high levels of miscommunication and misinterpretation. Explicit, verbalized consent is known to lead to fewer misinterpretations of consent; however, less is known about students’ beliefs around verbal consent. Objectives: To explore Canadian undergraduate students’ attitudes, opinions, and beliefs around verbal consent, and to investigate whether students believe verbal consent is always required during sexual encounters. Methods : This study used a qualitative description approach. Data was collected from 31 Canadian undergraduate students in a Human Sexuality course through an open-ended question embedded in an interactive course textbook. Students’ responses were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Many complexities exist in undergraduate students’ attitudes, opinions, and beliefs around verbal consent. Four major themes emerged from the data centring on familiarity, socio-cultural norms, reliance on non-verbal cues, and acknowledgement of the importance of verbal consent. Conclusion: The majority of participants believed that verbal consent was not required in all sexual encounters. Partner familiarity was a significant factor in using verbal consent. Social norms such as verbal consent being viewed as awkward or embarrassing were key barriers to students’ use. Verbal consent was viewed as an ideal, while non-verbal consent was viewed as realistic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".