“Kind of Natural, Kind of Wrong”: Young People's Beliefs about the Morality, Legality, and Normalcy of Sexual Aggression in Public Drinking Settings

Abstract

Unwelcome touching, groping, and kissing are illegal, but widely tolerated in public drinking settings. This contingency in the law's response means that patrons routinely negotiate the moral boundaries of nonconsensual sexual contact. We use 197 interviews with college‐age individuals to examine the discursive strategies young people employ when negotiating those boundaries. We find that most interviewees have experiences with sexual aggression, do not categorize it as aggression, but advocate for stronger legal punishments against offenders. In accounting for this paradox, they draw on contradictory legal and cultural narratives that both normalize and condemn men's sexual aggression. We build on legal consciousness theories and gender theories by highlighting the complex ways that gender stereotypes enshrined in law are implicated in the construction of a social problem. We also contribute to the sociology of culture by explicating the often unconscious link between culture and action revealed in young people's narratives about sexual aggression.

Personal and Political: Post‐Traumatic Stress Through the Lens of Social Identity, Power, and Politics

“…However, some national studies show that up to 70% of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime (Heise & Kotsadam, 2015; Shepherd, 2019). Because of this, being female becomes tied up with the experience, expectation, and understanding of this type of trauma risk (Iyer, 2019; Tinkler, Becker, & Clayton, 2018). In other words, violence, and managing the risk of violence, is central to the experience of being a woman.…”

A Balancing Act: Agency and Constraints in University Students’ Understanding of and Responses to Sexual Violence in the Night-Time Economy

“…One common theme emerging from the interviews was a sense of violation: Molly seems to be articulating both the everyday-ness of this violence which renders resisting futile, as well as the need to take a stance and reject it. Scholarship on violence against women has questioned this paradox asking why does 'normal' behaviours of men and boys feel like harmful violations to many women and girls (Kelly 1988 Letitia does not mention just one incident, but describes a pattern of aggressions and any help-seeking by women being ignored by bouncers who police physical conflicts between men (seen as harmful), whilst perceiving men's harassment of women as unproblematic (Tinkler et al 2016). This invisibilisation of men's sexual harassment of women as a private, trivial matter between two people has been documented in scholarship (Kelly and Radford 1990), and was what motivated one student to volunteer for the BI programme: In the face of disinterest from bar staff and bouncers who categorise women's complaints as an overreaction, one woman took matters into her own hands: I was once chucked off of a club because I basically stood up for something that I thought, no, I'm not going to take this.…”

“This is My Girl”: How Men’s Desires Obscure Women’s Sexual Aggression Experiences in Public Drinking Settings

“…Date and party rape scripts, for example, focus narrowly on rarer forms of assault (e.g., with roofies or physical force), decreasing the chances someone will see routine barroom bodily intrusion as aggressive or nonconsensual (Weiss and Colyer 2010). While sexual harassment scripts might help people make sense of barroom sexual aggression because they encompass less-penetrative forms of assault, they are tied to workplaces (Tinkler, Becker, and Clayton 2018). Few scripts therefore exist for evaluating unwanted sexual contact in public drinking settings.…”