Let’s Write About It: Rethinking Sexual Consent Through Therapeutic Writing with Women in Chile

As high rates of sexual violence worldwide have increasingly been met with educational initiatives promoting sexual consent as a core preventive strategy, it becomes crucial to understand how consent is actually conceptualized in specific sociocultural contexts. This study examines how a group of adult women in Chile conceptualize sexual consent and how their understandings align with, expand or diverge from the definition promoted by the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), a widely adopted international framework. Using a therapeutic writing methodology designed to support emotional safety and reflective depth, 34 women completed a collective writing workshop. For this paper, the main writing exercise was analyzed through thematic analysis. Results show three overarching themes: sexual consent as a self-directed and desire-aligned experience; the intricacies of giving in to sexual encounters as shaped by social expectations, emotional pressures, and relational considerations; and the tensions when differentiating consent from giving in, a distinction experienced as meaningful yet fluid and learned over time. Together, these findings reveal that our participants’ conceptualizations of sexual consent extend beyond normative international models, highlighting the need for attuned consent frameworks and educational approaches designed to prevent sexual violence.