College Students Don't Agree on What 'Yes Means Yes' Means
LatestA new poll from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that while college students understand that getting consent before having sex with someone is important, they don’t necessarily agree on what consent means. This is progress! Of a sort!
This is the same Post-Kaiser poll that confirmed that one in five women are sexually assaulted in college, as well as 1 in 20 men. The same 1,053 college students were polled on the meaning of “yes means yes”—specifically, asked to determine whether several different scenarios constituted consent for sex: undressing, getting a condom, or nodding. In each of those scenarios, 40 percent of students said that was consent, while another 40 percent said it wasn’t.
While that’s certainly a sharp divide—and while even older adults might differ on a few of those—the full results, which begin on page 12 of the poll, are pretty encouraging. Male students, for example, demonstrated a pretty sharp understanding on the “not having sex with passed-out people” front, as well as not assuming consent just because someone didn’t say no. From the Post: