How Adjacent Consent Undermines Sexual Assault Reporting

Sexual assault remains perniciously underreported. And even when victims do file a report, the system often blames them for the crime. Or at least implicates them as partially culpable. Many factors contribute to this, with accusatory questions that probe whether the (overwhelming female) victims bear some of the blame, such as:

• Had the victim been drinking?
• Was it a stranger or someone they knew?
• Did the victim do something before the assault to justify it?

A pair of researchers – hailing from Harvard Business School and the University of Michigan Law School  – wanted to look into another possible component: whether the victim voluntarily consented to sexual intimacy with the perpetrator before the assault. It’s a situation the researchers dub “adjacent consent,” which articulates the concept of a victim who’d agreed to something sexual but not what happened after.

Perceptions of Victims Matter

As we all know, the pop culture stereotype of a “dark alley rape,” is the exception, not the rule. Most sexual assaults strike during a date or “hook-up.” An extensive 2019 survey of American university students showed that many sexual assault victims identified “somebody I was involved with or intimate with at the time” as the assailant. Many respondents cited “the event happened in a context that began consensually” as the reason for failing to report.

After reviewing 11 preregistered experimental studies, the authors found that people typically regard female victims of sexual assault as “less virtuous, more blameworthy, and less deserving of support when their assault follows consensual sex-adjacent activity.”

Worse still, the researchers discovered that this adjacent consent penalty isn’t just a result of “sex-negative” attitudes. It also robs rape victims of the moral affirmation that victims of injustice normally receive.

Earlier research has shown that most of us support victims instinctively. In one study, participants read a story where Sarah let Gabrielle use her tablet. For some of the study participants, the scenario concluded. Others heard that Gabrielle then stole Sarah’s tablet. Participants saw Sarah as more “moral and trustworthy” when she was the victim of an injustice. This human tendency to “morally elevate” victims is known as the “Virtuous Victim Effect” (VVE). And researchers have documented it across a variety of transgressions.

While this might not make sense, the authors suggest this serves a practical psychological function. It motivates community members to take justice-restorative action.

The review found that when a woman who provided no consent is assaulted, people see her as more moral than if she weren’t victimized at all. In short, they benefited from the VVE.

But, more importantly, the average person doesn’t extend that same courtesy to victims when their assault takes place in the aftermath of a consensual sexual encounter. Even when faced with a case of obvious forcible rape, “respondents withhold moral elevation from victims who willingly participated in sex-adjacent activity.”

This pattern persists “across a wide swath of respondents, including political liberals and undergraduates who, when no assault occurs, have no moral objection to (or even affirmatively applaud) the relevant acts of voluntary intimacy.” This illustrated that even the most progressive or “sex-positive” members of a community punish – however passively – sexual assault victims who’d given adjacent consent.

Finally, the researchers articulate “a potential real-world consequence of adjacent consent.” In short, victims “involved or intimate” with their perpetrator aren’t likely to report the crime.

Methodology

This latest paper covered eleven experimental studies during which participants read a story about a woman, Alicia. The researchers had the participants assess her moral character and make other related judgments. The studies used a two-by-two between-subjects design with two manipulated factors:

1. Adjacent Consent vs. Complete Nonconsent – whether Alicia first participated in a consensual sexual encounter.
2. Victim vs. Nonvictim – whether Alicia suffered a sexual assault.

The scenarios showed Alicia attending a party where she meets someone, Michael. Depending on the scene, Alicia either flirts or engages with Michael before asking to stop (adjacent consent). Or she doesn’t flirt and agrees to go to his room (complete nonconsent). In the victim conditions, Michael assaults Alicia, while in the non-victim conditions, the encounter ends without assault.

Participants graded Alicia’s morality and trustworthiness on Likert scales to form a composite measure of her moral character. In the victim conditions, participants made additional judgments regarding sympathy, blame, support for the victim, and punishment for the perpetrator.

Victims Judged Harshly After Adjacent Consent

Across the studies, participants saw victims who’d given adjacent consent as less virtuous, put more of the blame on them, and felt less sympathy for them compared to those who gave no consent at all. While participants universally acknowledged that a rape took place, adjacent consent resulted in reduced severity perceptions and at least some belief in partial consent.

The researchers also looked into whether these penalties reflected sex-negative attitudes or if they influenced the victims’ responses.

Adjacent consent repeatedly undermined VVE. This effect persisted even when people didn’t inherently disapprove of the consensual activity. This suggests that voluntary intimacy changes the participants’ perceptions of the victims. This perception shift lingered regardless of the demographics of the participants.

Taken as a whole, the results offer compelling evidence that adjacent consent hinders the moral elevation of sexual assault victims. And that’s even when one doesn’t necessarily morally object to the victim’s activity ahead of the assault.

In the final study, researchers considered the potential real-world ramifications of these findings. Working with data culled from the 2019 Association of American Universities Campus Climate Survey – which included responses from more than 180,000 students – the authors assessed whether victims involved with their perpetrators were less likely to report the assault.

The authors discovered that victims who’d been intimate with their perpetrators were 3 percentage points – or 25 percent – less likely to report the incident, implying that fears of less community support might feed into this reticence.

Further Reading

Sexual Abuse and Its Impact on Suicidal Ideation 

A Survey of Medically Self-Sabotaging Behaviors Among Perpetrators of Partner Violence

Male Rape: The Silent Victim and the Gender of the Listener