A culture of consent - but to what extent? A qualitative interview study in Sweden on how the legislators' ambitions to create a consent culture could be achieved and manifested in practice.

Sammanfattning: In May 2018, the Swedish Parliament voted in favor of a Sexual Offense legislation based on voluntariness and the new law came into force on the first of July. In the proposal to change the legislation, the government claimed that a new consent culture must be established. The purpose of the amendments is not only to achieve legal effects but also to achieve societal effects, in terms of influencing society's perceptions and behaviors linked to consent, to reduce the widespread problem of sexual offenses in society. The question of how law can regulate values in society is far from simple, and this thesis has aimed to examine how the legislators' ambitions to create a consent culture could be achieved and manifested in practice. The intention was to explore how to reach a mutual understanding about consent and how the current culture around consent is experienced in people's everyday lives. A qualitative method has been utilized, and the study has a bottom-up approach by conducting interviews with students in Sweden. Theoretically, I have used the theoretical framework of Jürgen Habermas and his theory of communicative action together with the concepts of system and lifeworld. The results confirmed previous research statements that consent is a complex concept. People have different ways of interpreting consent in sexual encounters, which can be linked to how one is socialized and the cultural structures that underlie this. The analysis pointed out how consent is not yet something self-evident in terms of communicating this. The results show tendencies towards how it could be difficult to fully achieve mutual understanding about consent. However, there is potential that legislation together with education on consent might contribute to establishing and manifesting a consent culture in practice. The challenge ahead lies in how consent should not only be an awareness but also be the basis for sexual interaction between people.