Does No Mean No? Situational and Dispositional Factors Influence Emerging Adult Men's Intentions to Use Assault Tactics in Response to Women's Sexual Refusal During Hookups.

Hookups can result in sexual assault when men do not listen to requests from women to stop. It is thus important to identify factors that influence men's decisions to override direct refusals in these situations. Presently, we administered first-person vignettes depicting a prototypical hookup wherein the woman refuses the man's attempt to escalate intimacy. Using a national sample of emerging adult men (N = 420), we found that they on average did not completely rule out coercive or forcible tactics, but those elevated on rape myth acceptance, hypermasculinity, and psychopathy were uniquely at risk of assault when controlling for several other traits known to correlate with rape. Participants also reported being likelier to use coercive sexual practices when refusals occurred at higher levels of sexual intimacy already attained. Notably, diagnostic analyses revealed that a subset of men had a disproportionate influence on the regression estimates, and that these men were not only elevated across a range of assault-relevant traits, but also endorsed higher likelihoods of using coercion and force in the face of female sexual refusal. Although removal of these cases did not substantively alter the results, exploratory analyses revealed that these individuals responded differently to situational factors in ways that suggested sexual opportunism. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Just Say Yes? A Cluster Analytic Approach to Evaluating College Students' Understandings of Affirmative Consent.

Affirmative consent policies on college campuses establish more stringent standards for inferring consent to sex. Although these policies often permit nonverbal communication of consent, they rarely outline finer-grained distinctions about which specific behaviors can stand-in for verbal affirmation. It thus remains possible that students hold different understandings of this policy vis-à-vis the nonverbals used to convey and infer consent, which could undermine the purported utility of affirmative consent initiatives. We presently sampled 442 college undergraduates and asked them to rate whether specific behaviors often present during sexual interaction constitute affirmative indicators of consent. We hypothesized that students would separate into one of three groups depending on how restrictive (e.g., verbal communication only), inclusive (e.g., verbal and clear nonverbals) or potentially non-diagnostic (e.g., sexual arousal, passivity) their behavioral definitions were of affirmative consent. Using cluster analysis, we ultimately identified two groups adhering to a restrictive versus more inclusive operationalization. The former cluster understood affirmative consent as comprising verbal affirmation with variable endorsements of specific nonverbals, whereas the latter consistently endorsed a broader set of nonverbals along with variable ascription to behaviors that do not strongly imply consent. Students in the more inclusive group were more sexually experienced, less likely to use condoms, and viewed casual sex more favorably; as well as were likelier to have received sexual assault education from their parents before and during college, as well as from social media. These findings suggest that subgroups of college students construe affirmative consent policy differently and that these understandings may relate broadly to an individual's sexual experiences, attitudes, and/or education.

Person- and Incident-Level Predictors of Blame, Disclosure, and Reporting to Authorities in Rape Scenarios.

Rapes perpetrated during college are both common and underreported. Research highlights that several person- and incident-level factors relating to gender and sexuality may diminish reporting, by themselves and as they pertain to attributions of blame for the assault. In this study, male and female college students (N = 916) read vignettes describing a rape perpetrated by a man against a woman, a man against a man, or a woman against a man. Participants rated the blameworthiness of both perpetrator and victim and rated the likelihood that they would disclose the rape to social ties or health services or report it to authorities if they were in the victim's position. We found that male gender and heterosexual orientation predicted higher victim blame, lower perpetrator blame, and lower likelihood of disclosure, although relative endorsement of masculine gender ideology seemed to be driving these associations, as well as predicted lower likelihood of reporting to authorities. Controlling for other factors, vignettes portraying a woman raping a man led to a lower likelihood of disclosing or reporting the assault, compared with a male-on-female rape. We also found that the effects of female-on-male rape and traditional masculine ideologies tied to rape disclosure partially by decreasing blame to the perpetrator, which itself carried a unique influence on decisions to report. Our findings overall indicate that factors related to gender, sexuality, and blame have myriad influences and may contribute to low rates of disclosing rape to important outlets.