The conceptual shift at the heart of the study reflects more than a decade of evolving scholarship. Early measurement tools, such as the widely used Sexual Consent Scale and its revised version, asked respondents largely about consent as a pre-sexual agreement, capturing attitudes and behaviors that occur before intimacy begins. But researchers studying sexual violence prevention increasingly recognized that this framing leaves a dangerous gap: it says nothing about what happens in the middle of an encounter, when a partner becomes quiet, disengaged, or physically unresponsive. The Process-Based Consent Scale, originally developed by Glace, Zatkin, and Kaufman and published in Violence Against Women in 2021, was created to fill that gap by treating consent as something that can and must be re-established continuously, not assumed on the basis of a single earlier signal.

To bring this instrument to a Spanish-speaking population, the research team recruited 726 adults aged between 18 and 63 years. The sample included 505 women, 209 men, and 7 nonbinary participants, and it was deliberately diverse in sexual orientation, comprising 587 heterosexual, 77 bisexual, 49 homosexual, and 10 asexual individuals. This breadth matters, the authors argue, because most consent research has historically centered on cisgender, heterosexual college students, leaving sexual minority groups underrepresented despite evidence that their experiences of consent negotiation, coercion, and non-consensual sex differ in important ways. Previous work with gay, bisexual, and queer men, for example, has documented non-consensual sexual experiences and distinct understandings of consent cues, while studies of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals reveal orientations toward consent communication that mainstream instruments were never designed to capture.

Methodologically, the study followed a rigorous psychometric path. The researchers translated and culturally adapted the 17-item Process-Based Consent Scale, then used confirmatory factor analytic techniques, following established conventions for assessing model fit, to examine its underlying structure in the Spanish sample. The resulting validated version condensed to 16 items organized into three interpretable factors: ongoing consent, subtle coercion, and communicative sexuality. The ongoing consent factor captures behaviors such as stopping to check in when a partner seems less than enthusiastic, attending carefully to body language during sex, and continuing to confirm desires even with a familiar partner. The subtle coercion factor, by contrast, measures endorsement of manipulative beliefs and behaviors, including trying to change a partner’s mind after refusal, suggesting that someone who cares should have sex regardless of mood, or expecting a partner to feel guilty for declining. The communicative sexuality factor reflects open, frequent verbal discussion of sexual needs, desires, and boundaries.

Reliability analyses indicated that the Spanish version performs as a dependable measure, and, critically for construct validity, the scale correlated with the dimensions of the Spanish adaptation of the Sexual Consent Scale-Revised, which had itself been adapted and validated in Spanish only recently. This convergence suggests that the new instrument is tapping a related but distinct facet of consent: not the attitudes and pre-encounter agreements captured by older scales, but the dynamic, in-the-moment processes that unfold during sexual activity. For researchers and clinicians, having a validated Spanish-language tool is significant because it enables quantitative replication across languages and cultures, a step the authors identify as essential for building a cumulative science of consent.

The group comparisons produced findings that carry direct implications for sexual violence prevention. Gender differences emerged in two of the three factors. Men scored higher than women on the subtle coercion dimension, indicating greater endorsement of manipulative strategies and beliefs, a pattern consistent with broader literature on gender differences in aggression and with research showing that normative heterosexual scripts often cast men as initiators who push boundaries and women as gatekeepers who resist. Women, meanwhile, tended to score higher on dimensions reflecting attentive, communicative consent practices. These differences align with a substantial body of work documenting how traditional sexual scripts shape not only who initiates sex but also whose refusals are treated as final.

Sexual orientation also mattered. Bisexual participants, and bisexual women in particular, reported less sexual coercion than heterosexual individuals, scoring lower on the subtle coercion factor. The authors suggest several non-exclusive explanations rooted in prior research. Sexual minority communities often place heightened emphasis on explicit negotiation and critical consent, as documented in qualitative work on consent practices in queer and bisexual contexts, where assumptions based on default scripts are less available and more deliberate communication becomes normative. Individuals with more diverse sexual experience and identity exploration may also have developed richer vocabularies and habits for articulating desires and limits. Whatever the mechanism, the pattern underscores that consent processes are not uniform across populations, and that prevention programs calibrated exclusively to heterosexual samples may miss the mark for others.

The timing of this research is notable. Spain has recently overhauled its legal framework around sexual violence, with legislation that redefines consent in affirmative terms and places the burden on ensuring that consent is freely expressed throughout an encounter. Scientific instruments that can measure process-based consent in Spanish therefore serve a dual purpose: they advance basic research on how people negotiate intimacy, and they provide evaluation tools for educational and institutional interventions designed to comply with, and reinforce, the new legal standard. The authors explicitly frame their findings as a contribution to the prevention of and intervention in sexual violence, tailored to individual differences rather than applied as a one-size-fits-all prescription.

The study does come with limitations that shape how its results should be read. The sample, while large and sexually diverse, was composed of Spanish adults and included only seven nonbinary participants and ten asexual participants, groups too small to support robust separate analyses. The data were not pre-registered, and participants had not consented to public data deposition, so the dataset is available only upon request for collaboration. Self-report measures of coercion are also vulnerable to social desirability bias, particularly for a dimension like subtle coercion, where admitting manipulative tendencies may feel uncomfortable. Longitudinal work will be needed to determine whether process-based consent attitudes predict actual behavior, and cross-cultural replications will test whether the three-factor structure holds beyond Spain.

Even with these caveats, the study marks a meaningful step in the science of sexual consent. By demonstrating that consent can be reliably measured as a continuous process in a language and cultural context where no such instrument previously existed, and by revealing systematic differences in coercion and communication across gender and sexual orientation, the research equips educators, clinicians, and policymakers with a sharper lens. The central message resonates beyond psychometrics: a yes at the beginning of an encounter is not a contract that overrides everything that follows. Consent, the evidence suggests, is less like a signature and more like a conversation, one that attentive partners keep having, and one that prevention science is only now learning to measure properly.

Subject of Research: Validation of a Spanish process-based sexual consent measure and gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual coercion

Article Title: Sexual Consent as a Continuous Process in a Sexually Diverse Sample: Women and Bisexual Individuals Are Less Sexually Coercive Than Men and Heterosexual Individuals

Article References: Sexual Consent as a Continuous Process in a Sexually Diverse Sample: Women and Bisexual Individuals Are Less Sexually Coercive Than Men and Heterosexual Individuals. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03522-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03522-1

Keywords: sexual consent, process-based consent, sexual coercion, gender differences, sexual orientation, bisexual individuals, scale validation, Spanish population, sexual communication, sexual violence prevention, Archives of Sexual Behavior, psychometrics