Consent Violations and Ambivalence: Analyzing Reddit Stories Around Sexual Assault

Warning: This paper may contain triggering language for some readers, especially survivors of sexual assault.People often share their sexual experiences anonymously on social media. Sometimes, they are certain they were assaulted, hence expressing consent violations in online stories. However, sometimes they are confused about it (ambivalent stories). We analyze both of these cases to understand the entire landscape of these online stories. We adopt an existing dataset of sexual violence stories posted on Reddit. We label some of these stories for multiple consent criteria being violated, which helps us in identifying prominent scenarios of violated consent along with other psycholinguistic attributes. From the narrative standpoint, we compare ambivalent to non-ambivalent stories leading us to many psychological findings. For ambivalent stories, we found that the odds of verbal abuse, survivors breaking ties with the abuser, self-blame, and an intimate partner being the abuser are higher than in other cases. However, for non-ambivalent stories, the odds of economic and technological abuse, reporting or seeking legal help, and a stranger being the abuser are higher than in ambivalent cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze consent violations and ambivalence in online stories. Some of these findings from Reddit even corroborate legal and survey-based psychological works, lending credence to our computational work. This work advances research understanding consent violations and calls for more effective consent education and awareness.