Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre-existing 'common-sense'. In this paper we examine the ways in which young Australian men draw upon widely culturally shared accounts, or interpretative repertoires, of rape to exculpate rapists. In particular, we discuss the reliance placed on a 'lay' version of Tannen's (1992) 'miscommunication model' of (acquaintance) rape and detail the use of this account-the claim that rape is a consequence of men's 'not knowing'-as a device to accomplish exculpation. Implications of our methods for capturing young people's understanding of sexual coercion, rape and consent, and for the design of 'rape prevention' programmes, are discussed.

While several psychological theories of rape have been developed, Tannen's ‘ miscommunication’ model is dominant, informing ‘expert’ and popular accounts alike. Rape is constructed as an extreme example of miscommunication – whereby women's ‘failure’ to say ‘no’ is interpreted by men as sexual consent. Kitzinger and Frith have demonstrated that young women have an implicit understanding of the normative interactional structure of refusal, and it is this that explains their difficulty in ‘just saying no’ to unwanted sex. However, Kitzinger and Frith's study could not demonstrate, but only argue, that young men share this sophisticated understanding, such that women saying ‘no’ should not be necessary to refuse sexual intimacy. Here we extend Kitzinger and Frith's study, via the analysis of data from two focus groups held with young men. We demonstrate that, as Kitzinger and Frith suggested, men not only do have a refined ability to hear verbal refusals that do not contain the word ‘no’, but also – and importantly – an equally refined ability to ‘hear’ the subtlest of non-verbal sexual refusals.

This article describes a program of research that systematically examined the ways in which young heterosexual men draw on widely culturally shared accounts of rape to account for sexual coercion and sexual assault. In particular, the authors discuss the reliance placed on a lay version of Tannen's (1992) miscommunication model of (acquaintance) rape-the claim that rape is a consequence of men's not knowing-and young men's use of this account as a device to accomplish exculpation. The authors discuss the implications of their methods for capturing young people's understanding of sexual coercion, rape, and consent, as well as for designing rape prevention programs.Studies of the self-reported sexual behavior of young heterosexual men and women (e.g., Vanwesenbeck et al. 1998) have found that young men are more likely than young women to report attempts to actively and coercively shape sexual encounters according to their wishes, especially when they feel anxious or unsure. In contrast, researchers (e.g., Vanwesenbeck et al. 1998) have asserted that young women's reported engagements show that they tend to operate in a defensive fashion, trying to set limits on sexual activity and unwanted sex to counter the proactive sexual aggression of young men.Such findings offer a clear mandate for further, qualitative research in this area. Survey-based research methods are invaluable in giving some indication of the gross prevalence of such problematic conduct among young people, but they can offer little explanation regarding how, in mundane social interaction, such coercive sexual behavior is both accomplished and explained away. Our research helps contextualize such quantitative findings by addressing the disjuncture between self-reported or questionnaire-based accounts and the local pragmatics of knowledge-in-interaction. Applied discourse analysis can make a distinctive contribution to a literature still effectively dominated by self-report measures in this area.Our previous research (Hansen 2007;O'Byrne et al. 2008O'Byrne et al. , 2006 has indicated that one key way that coercive sexual behavior is rhetorically justified is via appeals to the otherwise apparently liberal and egalitarian miscommunication model. The miscommunication model (Tannen 1992) is arguably the dominant current account of acquaintance rape, informing both professional and lay understandings (Crawford 1995). The model rests on a proposed dichotomy in conversational styles between men and women-a dichotomy that in turn makes miscommunication between the sexes inevitable. By this perspective, acquaintance rape is explained as an (albeit extreme) instance of miscommunication, in which both man and woman fail to interpret the other's verbal and nonverbal cues, with the resulting communication breakdown culminating in rape (Crawford;

Prevailing theory stresses psychological factors in explaining why men rape. Recent UK government rape prevention campaigns employ a “miscommunication model”, suggesting men understand neither consent, nor how women convey sexual refusal. In this paper we cast doubt on these claims.

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