Sexual consent decreases with age for women who have experienced nonconsensual sexual activity

Sexual consent is a crucial and complex aspect of healthy partnered sexual behaviour. There is currently limited research on how age and past nonconsensual experiences may be associated with a person's experiences of internal consent feelings and external consent behaviours. The current study sought to address this gap. The analytic sample included 658 participants (50.5% women), ranging from 18 to 80 years old. The data were collected in an online cross-sectional study. We found that there was a significant negative association between internal and external sexual consent with age for women with previous nonconsensual experiences. Age was not associated with internal or external consent for women without previous nonconsensual experience or men with or without previous nonconsensual experiences. Lower ratings of sexual consent for older female victim-survivors of sexual assault demonstrates the lasting effects of nonconsensual experiences on women's sexual wellbeing and sexual agency, which corroborates previous research showing that navigating sex and consent communication following sexual assault can be a difficult and ongoing process for women.