Suzanne Gallacher-Graham she/her

Working title of PhD: Sex Education and Sexual Consent: Capturing the living realities of young people negotiating sexual consent in Scotland

Institution: University of Strathclyde and University of the West of Scotland

Supervisors: Professor Yvette Taylor (UWS) and Dr Louise Brangan (Strathclyde)

Funding Source: ESRC

Year commenced: 2022

Full or part-time: Part-time

Synopsis: 

In response to the global prevalence of sexual harms, consent education is increasingly constructed as the solution (eg Scotland’s VAWG policy). However, sexual consent is misunderstood and under-researched, and sex education has been subject to debate and controversy amongst a moral panic around gender and sexuality. Lost in societal debates are the voices of young people themselves who are perceived to be most vulnerable. Simplistic, polarising views lack nuance or a deep understanding of the living realities of young people in Scotland who are trying to navigate the abundance of conflicting information (or lack of) and negotiate sexual consent within their own lives. For consent education to be effective there needs to be a strong understanding and agreed conceptualisation of what sexual consent is (and isn’t). Our awareness and discourses around consent in relation to rape or sexual assault is increasing, but how we conceptualise is subject to change and interpretation. I argue we need to understand sexual consent not just as a strategy to reduce violence and prevent criminality but as a minimum standard, moving towards an ethical understanding of sex and consent to respect our partners, towards mutual pleasure and wanting, and overall respectful, joyful and healthy relationships (Wodda and Panfil, 2021; Garcia, 2023).
This project aims to explore how young people (aged 11-18) understand and negotiate sexual consent in Scotland; and how effective current sex education policies and curricula in Scotland are in reducing harm and sexual violence or liberating young people in their sexuality, agency and freedom from harm. This study will be situated within feminist, sex positive criminology approaches which centre on gender equality, education and prevention

Research Questions
1. How do young people in Scotland understand and negotiate sexual consent in Scotland?
2. To what extent is current sexual consent education in Scotland effective?

The methodology uses photovoice as a form of participatory action research to collect, analyse and disseminate data in a trauma-informed manner. Visual (photographs) and textual (written descriptions of photographs and the transcript of a group discussion structured around the commonly used SHOWED structure in photovoice) will be analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis process in conjunction with Brown and Collins’ systematic visio and textual analysis framework (2021).

Keywords: consent, sex education, sex positive criminology