CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Mikó, Katalin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Grey Zone Between Consent and Sexual Violence: Hungarian Higher Education Students' Attitudes Towards Unwanted Sex |
| Summary | In this thesis, I study Hungarian higher education students' narratives of the grey zone between consent and sexual violence, because I want to explore how unwanted sex is labeled and negotiated, in order to understand how rape myth acceptance and gendered expectations towards sexuality can create ambiguous sexual experiences, and why sexual violence has occurred within higher education. While the participants of the present study approached beliefs about sexual violence with a lot of criticism, instances of rape myth acceptance illustrate how rape myths can influence whether ambiguous sexual encounters get labeled as sexual violence. The discussion of the grey zone also shows that if false beliefs about rape are accepted, reliance on consent can be insufficient to clearly negotiate the mutual wantedness of sex. The analysis of prevailing gendered expectations within society explains how the double standard influencing female sexuality interferes with the concept of consent as an unambiguous tool to negotiate sexuality. Expectations towards what a “normal man” is like divides men into a false dichotomy of “normal” and “rapists” and obscures the characteristics of non-violent and acquaintance rape. Finally, heteronormative assumptions about sexual violence and gendered expectations limit the scope of who is a victim and who can be a perpetrator. Considering these findings and that Hungarian students’ experiences with sexual violence are not necessarily connected with the campus, blaming universities solely for students’ experiences with sexual violence and expecting the problem to be solved on the higher education level would obscure the responsibility of earlier sex education, overlook the prevailing gendered expectations within Hungarian society and neglect the experiences of victims of sexual violence in other strata of society. |
| Supervisor | Rédai Dorottya |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/miko_katalin.pdf |
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