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Many people have argued that the BDSM community has a higher rate of sexual consent violations than the outside community.
As far as I’m aware, the largest study on this issue is the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s Consent Counts study, which found that 33% of respondents had had a prenegotiated limit violated in a BDSM scene or relationship or had negotiated a safeword or safesign and had it ignored. On the other hand, only about 18.3% of women and ~6% of men have been raped. Does that mean that the BDSM community has a higher rape rate?
Yes. But complicatedly so.
First: many people do not play with safewords. For instance, in pretty much all the kinky sex I have, “no”, “stop”, “ow”, etc. have their ordinary meanings, and therefore I don’t really need a safeword. While it’s possible that people would consider “we negotiated a flogging, it was too much for me and I said ‘stop’, they kept on going” to be ignoring a safeword, it’s also possible they wouldn’t– even though that is clearly a case of sexual consent violations in the BDSM community.
Second: most data about sexual consent violations in the vanilla world is divided up into smaller subcategories. For instance, NISVS divides sexual consent violations into:
- “rape” (being penetrated in the anus, vagina, or mouth, against the victim’s will, through physical force or threats of physical force or when the victim was unconscious or too intoxicated to consent)
- “being made to penetrate someone else” (penetrating the attacker in the anus, vagina, or mouth, against the victim’s will, though physical force or threats of physical force or when the victim was unconscious or too intoxicated to consent)
- “sexual coercion” (unwanted anal, oral, or vaginal sex that occurs after the person is pressured in a nonphysical way)
- “unwanted sexual contact” (unwanted sexual experiences that involve touch but not penetration, such as unwanted kissing or unwanted fondling)
It seems plausible that many of the things the Consent Counts survey is talking about would fall in the “unwanted sexual contact” or “sexual coercion” categories. Unfortunately, NISVS doesn’t offer a percentage of people who have experienced rape, unwanted sexual contact, being made to penetrate someone else, or sexual coercion (given that these groups no doubt often overlap), but eyeballing it it looks like somewhere between a third and half of women and somewhere around a fifth of men. There are very large margin-of-error bars on this, but it seems about the rate that is in the BDSM community.
On the other hand, you could argue, while a lot of kinky consent violations would technically be put in the “unwanted sexual contact” category, they’re not central examples of unwanted sexual contact. Nonconsensual electricity play, needle play, or verbal humiliation might usually be more similar to nonconsensual vaginal penetration than nonconsensual kissing, in terms of how the experience affects the victim. Unfortunately, this leaves a lot of unanswered and unanswerable questions, such as “what percentage of kinky consent violations are in the more-like-rape and more-like-unwanted-sexual-contact categories?” and “is that even a meaningful question to be asking or is it more like asking which chicken is most like a dog?”
(This confusion is why I chose the perhaps awkward phrasing “sexual consent violations” instead of “sexual assault” or “rape.”)
Third: The Consent Counts survey only examines sexual consent violations in the BDSM community, as opposed to the percentage of people in the BDSM community who are survivors of sexual consent violations. This makes sense, because you wouldn’t want the data to be confounded by, say, the hypothesized link between an interest in nonconsent play and being a survivor of rape. However, the lifetime rate of rape in the general population includes things like child sexual abuse, which means that we’re comparing apples to oranges. Unfortunately, the CC survey does not include the percent of people in the BDSM community who experienced a sexual assault in the last year, so we could compare apples to apples.
Furthermore, the Consent Counts data explicitly excludes consent violations in vanilla sex. However, other data includes all sexual consent violations, vanilla and nonvanilla. So a naive comparison probably massively undercounts how much being a member of the BDSM community increases your risk.
In conclusion: the Consent Counts data underestimates the increase in risk of sexual consent violations you experience by being a member of the BDSM community. We can’t know how much it underestimates that risk. In their next survey, I hope they ask about the rate of consent violations in the past year and include a question like “did anyone have sex with you when you said ‘no’ or ‘stop’ and had not negotiated a safeword?” Also, comparing kinky sex and vanilla sex is hard.
Thing of Things 
How is that ‘complicatedly no’ I may have misread something, but it seems like ‘complicatedly even more yes’
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It says, “Yes. But complicatedly so.” — i.e., yes, but a deeper analysis reveals that comparing incidence of rape to incidence of safeword-violation is not an ideal method for answering this question.
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*facepalm*
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Nonconsensual [. . .] verbal humiliation might usually be more similar to nonconsensual vaginal penetration than nonconsensual kissing, in terms of how the experience affects the victim.
This is a bit of a tanget, but I think this is (probably) rather revealing of the inferential distance between us, since even sticking those first two adjectives together on the same noun seems a bit weird to me, and I’d rank unwanted verbal humiliation (from someone I don’t have strong pre-existing emotional ties to) as probably roughly as likely to affect me as an unwanted ass grab.
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How about from someone with whom you do have strong emotional ties? And especially in a situation where, since you trust them very much, you have deliberately made yourself vulnerable, so that both of you can enjoy some intense kink? And after some of that intense kink has already happened, and you can’t instantly switch back into normal mode?
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How about from someone with whom you do have strong emotional ties?
That could potentially be quite horrific, but I feel like the nature of the horror is different. Like . . . I don’t think I’d think of that as a sexual violation, as opposed to, say, emotional abuse.
This may also be a gap in assumptions of a different sort: The overwhelming majority of stories I’ve seen about consent violations in a BDSM context have involved people who were strangers or just play partners, not romantic partners or friends, and so when I see discussion about what a consent violation would “usually” be like, that’s the terms I’m likely to be thinking in. This may or may not be empirically incorrect; I really don’t know.
And especially in a situation where, since you trust them very much, you have deliberately made yourself vulnerable
Emotional vulnerability, beyond the level that comes automatically with caring about someone whether you want it or not, is something I try pretty hard to avoid. It’s difficult for me to imagine what things would look like after deliberately cultivating it.
And after some of that intense kink has already happened, and you can’t instantly switch back into normal mode?
Again, this is far enough outside my personal experience to be hard for me to reliably analyze. I can try to draw analogies from religious and/or drug-induced altered states, but I’m not convinced that the relevant dynamics are likely to be sufficiently similar. Hmm.
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Well, I’m no expert on either casual sex or casual kink, but I think it does require some trust, especially if you intend to bottom or submit.
And if you’ve just discovered this community of “your people”, people who understand your desires and won’t consider you broken or a monster, you might be a little too trusting until your first negative experience.
If it works for you and your partners, that’s fine. But interacting with a stoic brick wall is not my idea of intimate fun, and I suspect I’m not the only person with this preference 😛
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Well, I’m no expert on either casual sex or casual kink, but I think it does require some trust, especially if you intend to bottom or submit.
Physically, sure. I’m not sure about emotionally. But see below.
And if you’ve just discovered this community of “your people”, people who understand your desires and won’t consider you broken or a monster, you might be a little too trusting until your first negative experience.
I can see that.
If it works for you and your partners, that’s fine. But interacting with a stoic brick wall is not my idea of intimate fun, and I suspect I’m not the only person with this preference 😛
I think that either I’m making a distinction that you’re not or we’re drawing the same distinction in different places, since “avoiding emotional vulnerability as much as possible while caring about someone -> stoic brick wall” strikes me as a bizarre and incomprehensible leap.
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I’d be astonished if a group of people whose kink is boundary-violation weren’t more prone to non-consensual boundary-violation than the general population. That’s like being surprised that SCUBA divers are more apt to get the bends.
I’m glad people are looking at the statistics, though, given the atmosphere of secrecy around sex. It’s important that anyone involved (or looking to get involved) in BDSM knows the risks.
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