(Re)Writing Sexual Consent: Affirmative Consent Culture in Sexual Misconduct Policies of Higher Education Institutions

This study primarily seeks to determine what policy language best reflects affirmative consent culture in the sexual misconduct policies of higher education institutions. It considers such policies to be important and influential documents which reflect institutional values, and as such, have the capacity to transform campus cultures. Coding categories based off of the concerns of Feminist Critical Policy Analysis were developed and applied to a corpus of eight policies, and the results of the coding were further analyzed rhetorically. The study found that policies are already reflective of affirmative consent culture, using similar language, content and structure. However, the study also found smaller interesting trends within policies, including the characterization of institutions as parental personas, and the acknowledgment of student-faculty relationships