Comparing Attitudes toward Sexual Consent between Japan and Canada

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I commend the authors for a high-quality manuscript that uses rigorous methods to explore five aims related to differences in sexual consent attitudes between Japanese and Canadian participants in large nationally representative samples. This is important and timely work, and I believe it is suitable for publication in Sexes. My minor suggestions for the authors to consider are below.

1.     Page 3, lines 98-101: This sentence reads strangely. Perhaps reword?

2.     Did you control for any of participants’ personal sexual experiences? For example, whether individuals were victims of sexual violence themselves, or had even engaged in sexual activity, may make a difference in their consent-related attitudes regardless of laws. If you have these measures, it may be worth accounting for, but at the very least it should be listed as a limitation if not.

3.     In the “Development of Scenarios” paragraph on Page 5, I’d suggest being consistent with the way participant Ns are presented in the parentheses. Specifically, since you already mention earlier in the paragraph that both pilot studies were conducted with Japanese participants, I think line 219 can simply read “In the second pilot study (n = 289), respondents were…”

4.     I’m having a hard time understanding the sentence on Page 9, lines 332-336. The way it reads seems as though Hypothesis 1 is not supported, but then it states that it was? Was this a typo?

5.     If the authors are not constrained by a word limit, I’d love to see more in the Discussion concerning interpretations of the results, their implications, and takeaways to inform future research/intervention efforts. This is exciting and novel work and I believe more recommendations can be made.

Author Response

We are grateful for the reviewer for reviewing our article and for giving constructive comments. We have revised our manuscript. Please see the attached for specific comments (in green), our responses (in blue), and passages in the manuscript (changes are highlighted in red).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for submitting your manuscript (Comparing attitudes toward sexual consent between Japan and Canada) to Sexes for publication consideration. Overall, I truly appreciated the cross-cultural aspect of this manuscript in combination with the large sample sizes from both countries. Unfortunately, I have serious reservations about the survey items that were used (not established scales) and the language translation performed on the items. There remain many very choppy, broken English statements within the scenario statements and the general attitudes toward sexual consent items. The amount of ambiguity here in how the items might have been interpreted by the respondents cannot be ignored. Very unfortunately, these are changes that cannot be made now that the study has concluded.

Abstract

The last sentence of the abstract emphasizes the need for comparative research to uncover differences, but it does not indicate “why” this is important. To what end and/or purpose is this type of research crucial

Introduction

As a general point, there needs to be a more contextualized and theoretically sound justification for the study. Besides the differences in the laws, what is the larger cultural context in these two nations (i.e., sexual values) that contribute to why this research needs to be done. A theoretical grounding of the area of sexual consent in this paper would also be useful. 

1.     Section 1: It has not been introduced yet in the manuscript that “perceived consent” refers to the perception that the victim (in any given situation) provided their consent. This explanation needs to be provided when the term first appears. This term first appears here and needs more description/explanation/clarity.

2. Section 1.1.2: Changes to Canadian law regarding sexual assault happen only at the federal level. Sexual assault laws are federal in Canada. Please remove the reference to “provincial level”

3. Section 1.2: The authors note that consent plays a critical role in Canadian law that it does not yet in Japan, but I guess my question is what is the author’s evidence that the general public is “aware” of the intricacies of consent within the legal system of both countries? Data from this project were collected in Fall of 2021. Seems to me the entire world was aware of the #METOO movement that had occurred just a few years earlier (Fall of 2017 is considered the start of the movement) and was still at an all-time-high; which, indirectly may have instigated changes to Japanese law. With this movement on the radar of people worldwide, it may have seriously hampered efforts to find ‘differences’ between cultures re: sexual consent.

4.     As a follow-up to point above, a discussion of the influence of the #METOO movement on the data collected for this study should be featured in the introduction and the limitation section of this manuscript.

Method

5.     Section 2.1: the authors note that the ‘same’ company was used in both countries to recruit respondents, but a few lines later, the authors state that respondents received ‘web points’ from the companies (plural). So, which is it?

6. Section 2.1: The company that recruited the respondents from both Japan and Canada may have inadvertently influenced the data collected given the ‘type’ of individuals who would visit their websites. Are there any assurances that the samples gathered via the company’s various websites are not skewed toward a specific demographic? More detailed information about ‘who’ the typical visitor is to the various companies websites would be useful information to evaluate the sample’s veracity.

7. Section 2.1: Given that the data were collected in the Fall of 2021, do the authors have any evidence on how the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic may have influenced the data, the sample, the collection process, the results, etc.? Please consider adding some speculation to the limitation section of the manuscript.

8. Section 2.1: Which census year was used to allocate the Canadian data? The authors also indicate (in this same sentence) that the Japanese sample was allocated according to the Canadian sample. Yes, this makes the samples more comparable, but it also makes the Canadian sample better representative of the Canadian population but the Japanese sample not representative of the Japanese population. Correct? The rationale for this decision (because Japanese data were easier to collect) does not seem logical. Please clarify/explain.

9. Line 206: The word “much” should be replaced with “many”.

10. Section 2.2: “development of scenarios”: This study starts with a very large number of scenarios and ends up with very few (from 100 to 9). I do believe there needs to be more description of this process of selection, including rationales for exclusion, examples of items that were “difficult to understand” or “unrealistic” to a Japanese audience that seemingly were fine in past research using English speaking participants. The language translation procedure used in this study is discussed, but it appears (based on the items) a lot less rigorous than it is written in the manuscript. This section (dev’t of scenarios) should also not confuse the general attitudes toward consent items with the scenarios – please remove these sentences. In addition, the authors note that 9 scenarios were finally selected, but the Tables and the Appendices only list 7 items. Please fix.

11. “General attitudes toward sexual consent”: After reviewing the items that make up this scale, the English language translation is very rough (ie., poor wording, structure, grammar). “…to do a sexual act” (item 2,4,7,8,9) is not a phrase commonly used in English. “Going on a date alone…” (item 3) is confusing. It is actually not clear what “alone” means in this context. If you are alone, you are not with another person (i.e., a date). If alone means that the couple is not chaperoned, this is a significant cultural gap in the choice of items, because North American couples are not chaperoned on their dates – even young couples. The language of “to have sexual consent with them” is very awkward English. There are also items in this set that are unrelated to sexual consent (items 6,8). I am actually very concerned that the English translation of these items led to significant confusion among the Canadian respondents. Many of these items also used the phrasing “sexual act” which leaves it completely ambiguous as to what respondents had in mind when rating the items. Have these items been subjected to scale development procedures such as principle components analysis?, confirmatory FA? Gender invariance testing? Or even correlations with other more established sexual consent measures to establish some validity? In addition, the authors mentions that the items (taken from Mukai et al) were “adapted”. That process also needs to be detailed.

12. Line 247: Was gender only provided as man or woman? Any non-cis-gendered categories? It is likely with samples as large as obtained here that there would be some non-binary people.

13. Section 2.4: Translation section: This section talks numerous times about “adjustments” that occurred based on feedback. Perhaps provided a couple of examples of the types of adjustments being made would help the reader with understanding this process much better. Remember, quality research should be replicable from the manuscript’s detailed description of the procedures.

Results

14. Line 276-288: If the EFA assessment on both the scenarios and the attitudes toward consent measures both arrived at single factor structures, why did the authors continue to conduct analyses for each scenario and each consent item separately instead of averaging the items and conducting one analysis?

Discussion

15. Section 5.3: There is no limitations section in this manuscript. Please add. 

Table 1: the numbers in this table for Japan are IDENTICAL to the numbers for Canada. Please fix. 

Other tables need proper formatting. (e.g., remove centering) Please fix. 

There are significant concerns with the English language translation of the measurements/scale/questions and scenarios presented to participants in this study (especially for the Canadians). Given the heavily broken English used, it is highly possible that the translation did not convey the same meaning it did in Japanese and/or confused the Canadian participations regarding what was being asked of them. This is a serious concern. 

The quality of the English language in the manuscript itself is fairly decent. 

Author Response

We are grateful for the reviewer for reviewing our article and for giving constructive comments. We have revised our manuscript. Please see the attached for specific comments (in green), our responses (in blue), and passages in the manuscript (changes are highlighted in red).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

the article deals with a topic of current and global interest. However, the manuscript requires several revisions.

The choice of why to compare Canada with Japan does not seem clear. Why these two countries and not other countries for example? Why weren't other countries involved too?

Ip 1 “be more likely to perceive the imposition of punishment as appropriate”

Author Response

We are grateful for the reviewer for reviewing our article and for giving constructive comments. We have revised our manuscript. Please see the attached for specific comments (in green), our responses (in blue), and passages in the manuscript (changes are highlighted in red).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I have reviewed the author’s feedback on my critique, and while they have addressed a number of the concerns I had, the biggest issue is one they cannot change “after-the-fact”. The English language translation of the items is, in my opinion, highly problematic at best. Nuance in word choice, grammar, and logical flow is incredible important in scale development. Dozens of studies have discussed how individual words (e.g., sex) lead to different interpretations. There is a growing subfield of articles obsessively concerned with how sexuality scales are problematic because they are not nuanced enough, don’t define their terms, and are potentially culturally bound. Precision and rigour in translation is crucial. Without this, it is simply “garbage in, garbage out”.

Unfortunately, there is no way to fix this now. On this basis alone, I stand by my decision to reject.

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Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Author Response

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript. We have made further changes to the manuscript according to Reviewer 2's comments.