Miscommunication and Sexual Assault

As part of my CSL placement at the Sexual Assault Centre on campus I am a member of the education committee. Last week I did my first presentation to a group of Graduate Education Psychology students. As a part of the workshop we unpack some of the myths and stereotypes the media presents to us about the issue of sexual assault. As my co-facilitator and I were debunking the myth that acquaintance sexual assault happens because of a miscommunication, one member of the audience challenged us on that point. Their argument was that there are many studies that note the fallibility of communication and how sometimes signals can be crossed. In our workshop we assert that “survivors always communicate some form of ‘no’ in a sexual assault situation and all of us are aware when the person we are with does not want to engage in sexual activity, or wants to stop, regardless of whether the person verbally says the word ‘no’ or not.” (ctd. in Working for Change, 2013)

 First this obviously shows us is that when we cite studies on an issue as fraught as sexual assault there’s going to be research that fall on both sides of the fence. Beyond that though it also demonstrates why sexual assault is such a difficult subject to grapple with on a social level because of hegemonic understandings of heteronormative interaction.

Indicators of non-consent, be they verbal or behavioral, are quite attributed to playing coy, particularly in a heterosexual interaction. There’s this idea that women are “playing hard to get” when they flirt with a man, and are warned not to “give it up” too easily. These messages of what constitutes good feminine sexuality reinforce ideas that we have discussed in class. In her article Hakvag quotes Hird and Jackson saying “young women’s sexuality is defined by is absence and [their] sexual desire is framed by the accommodation of male desire.” Hakvag also discusses the notion of sex as property and takes issue with this understanding of sex as gift, which plays into one of the discourses of heterosexuality that Gavey mentions, the have-hold discourse. These normative discourses form, as Gavey terms it, the “scaffolding of rape” and create a culture in which a women’s signs of non-consent are simply dismissed as playing coy. But I do not think such dismissals can be equated with a miscommunication. It demonstrates an understanding of, “I know this person is refusing this sexual attention, but they’re just playing hard to get -- I know what they really want.”

I can see the appeal of attributing a sexual assault to a miscommunication; no one is at fault, it was just an accident. But such an understanding has the potential to minimize a survivor’s experience. Therefore while I can see the value of challenging absolutist statements (like that from the SAC presentation, “survivors always communicate no”)  in an academic setting. After all, as this class has shown us, sexual assault is not as cut and dry as the SAC represents it; however, for the context of the work we do at the centre supporting survivors I think it is incredibly important that we take a position that leaves no doubt that we are there for the survivor one hundred percent.

Works Cited

Gavey, Nicole. “Unsexy Sex: Unwanted Sex, Sexual Coercion and Rape,” Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of   Rape (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 136-165.

Hakvåg, Hedda H. “Does Yes Mean Yes?: Exploring Sexual Coercion in Normative Heterosexuality”. Canadian Woman Studies(2009), 28(1), 121-126.

McCaw, J. & Senn, C. (1998). “Perception of Cues in Conflictual Dating Situations: A Test of The Miscommunication Hypothesis.” Violence Against Women, 4(5): 609-624.