Yes Means Yes Approach To Sexual Assault Prevention: A Qualitative Exploration

Event Center A & B

One in five college women are sexually assaulted (Washington Post-Kaiser Foundation, 2015). Prevention programs address the growing phenomenon of sexual assault on college campuses; however, many interventions are problematic and can blame the victim (e.g., Gidycz et al., 2001; Bradley et al., 2009). In most approaches, the issue of consent is not taken into account. Sexual assault can be often defined as sex with the absence of consent (nonconsensual sexual activity) (Jozkowski & Peterson, 2013). The Yes Means Yes (YMY) approach to sexual assault prevention recently legislated in California has defined consent for sexual activities as an explicit yes, or “affirmative consent” rather than an absence of “no”, which has been traditionally viewed as the No Means No (NMN) approach (SB-967 Student Safety: Sexual Assault, 2014). Given both its newness and legal applications, the YMY sexual assault prevention approach warrants research into its effectiveness. The purpose of the current study is to qualitatively explore reactions to these two consent interventions. Participants were exposed to a 2 hour intervention of either YMY or NMN and subsequently asked to complete action plans. An ethnically diverse sample was recruited from a Southern California university (N = 56). Analysis procedures included open coding on the questionnaires and finding emergent patterns among participants’ responses (Given, 2008). Preliminary results demonstrated a variety of reactions to each intervention. Implications include improvement of consent discussions in sexual assault prevention. A future research direction is further quantitative study to see if the findings generalize.