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The Discursive Reconstruction of Sexual Consent

This paper explores the discursive means by which a defendant in a sexual assault tribunal attempts to represent or construct himself as innocent. The relative success of discursive strategies in deflecting the defendant's accountability for the sexual assault in question, I argue, is directly related to the ideological perspective that `frames' the proceedings of the tribunal. More specifically, I demonstrate how what Crawford (1995) calls a deficiency model of miscommunication between women and men informs, indeed dominates, this sexual assault tribunal. That is, both the defendant and the tribunal members (representatives of the university who decide on the guilt or innocence of the defendant) communicate that neither the man (the defendant) nor the women (the complainants) have been able to interpret the other's verbal and non-verbal communicative acts accurately, primarily because the complainants have been `deficient' in their attempts to signal non-consent.