Dr Saskia Jones

Legal definitions of sexual consent emphasise ‘freedom’ as central to valid consent; however, power inequalities may complicate freedom. This paper discusses findings from a two-stage focus group study with young people (aged 13–23) in England exploring the implications of power inequalities for sexual consent. In Stage 1, 77 participants explored and ranked the types of power inequalities they felt were common within young people's sexual relationships, with age, gender and popularity being identified as the most common power inequalities. In Stage 2, 43 participants discussed power inequalities using scenarios based on the Stage 1 findings and considered their implications for sexual consent. Thematic analysis of the data produced two themes: powerless and powerful roles in consent communication and power inequalities implicitly constrain freedom to consent. Consent communication was constructed as a unidirectional process whereby those with more power initiate, and those with less, gatekeep. Such roles require deconstruction to position consent as mutual and actively negotiated by partners. Further, since power inequalities were seen to place implicit constraints on freedom to consent, we advocate for an explicit exploration of power and privilege within Relationships and Sex Education to equip young people to recognise, challenge and negotiate these constraints.

Involving participants/intended audiences in discourse analysis may help to avoid overemphasising the structural effects of discourse and silencing participant voice. Yet, involving participants in complex analytic processes effectively can prove difficult. In this study, the authors undertook a Foucauldian discourse analysis of sexual consent material within eight (predominantly UK) wide-ranging, youth-focused campaigns to identify the discourses relevant to sexual consent and produce a collage for each discourse. Then, 43 young people from West Yorkshire, UK, helped to identify the underlying messages in the collages (i.e. the discourses), and consider who was constructed as powerful, and who benefited and ‘lost out’ from these messages. This paper explores the benefits and challenges of involving young people in a discourse analysis in this way, and concludes that, a ‘both/and’ approach should be employed to acknowledge both young people’s perspectives and the academic researcher’s desire to retain a critical stance toward problematic discourses.