When Compliance Is Mistaken for Consent

Examining the role of sexual coercion within patterns of power, control, and abuse.

Consent Cannot Be Understood Without Understanding Coercion

We are still only scratching the surface when it comes to understanding sexual coercion within intimate partner relationships and for victims of adolescent and adult clergy sexual abuse.

Much of the public conversation about coercive control focuses on surveillance, isolation, financial abuse, intimidation, emotional abuse and threats. These are important.

But what is often missing is a deeper discussion about how sex or sexual acts can be used as a tool of power and control within an ongoing pattern of abuse.

For many people, sexual violence is still imagined as a physically violent act committed by a stranger. The image is one of force, resistance, and injury. Yet decades of research suggest that physical force is often the least common tactic used to obtain sexual compliance.

The concept of unwanted sexual activity is also more complex than it first appears. One of the goals of grooming and coercive control is to make the abuse invisible, not only to others but often to the victim-survivor themselves (Hill, 2019).

As a researcher examining clergy abuse, professional sexual exploitation, and coercive control it was clear in the data that perpetrators frequently rely on forms of deception that obscure the abusive nature of the relationship. Romantic deception may convince a person that they are loved. Therapeutic deception may convince them that the relationship is helping them. Spiritual deception may convince them that the relationship is God’s will or part of a divine plan or will result in purification (Kennedy, 2008; Simpson, 2024).

Under these conditions, many victim-survivors do not experience themselves as being physically forced into unwanted sexual activity. Instead, they may believe they are making a free choice, participating willingly, or acting out of love, loyalty, care, duty, or faith.

This is precisely what makes grooming so effective.

The victim-survivor’s apparent participation is often later used as evidence of consent, while the deception, manipulation, and abuse of power that shaped that participation remain largely invisible.

As a result, many survivors do not initially describe what happened to them as abuse. Instead, they describe feeling confused about their own role, questioning whether they were complicit, or carrying profound shame because they believed they chose the relationship.

The challenge for practitioners is recognising that a person can feel invested in a relationship, believe they love the perpetrator, and participate in sexual activity while simultaneously being subjected to coercion, exploitation, and abuse. It can be AND / BOTH. It is not EITHER / OR!

My own research into adult clergy sexual abuse led me to examine the literature on sexual coercion. What I found challenged many of the assumptions that continue to shape public understanding, legal frameworks, and professional responses to sexual violence.

Research using the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) found that sexual coercion commonly involves verbal pressure, emotional manipulation, misuse of authority, false promises, relationship threats, persistent pursuit after refusal, lies, and attacks on a person’s self-worth or sexuality (Koss et al., 1987; Koss et al., 2007).

Similarly, Struckman-Johnson and colleagues (2003) found that emotional manipulation was one of the most common coercive tactics experienced by women. Participants described repeated requests after refusal, threats to end relationships, claims of love and affection, questioning sexuality, assertions of authority, and threats of self-harm.

The study also found that being taken advantage of while intoxicated, or after being deliberately encouraged to drink, was far more common than the use of physical force. In fact, only 6% of women reported physical force or threats of harm, while emotional manipulation, persistent pressure, and alcohol-related tactics were substantially more common.

The use of alcohol or other substances is strategic. While alcohol is frequently discussed in terms of impaired decision-making, it can also function as a tool of coercion and entrapment. In some cases, perpetrators deliberately lower a partner’s (or their target’s) inhibitions before encouraging or introducing sexual activities that the person may never have considered under normal circumstances.

These activities may involve behaviours that conflict with the person’s values, beliefs, boundaries, relationship expectations, or sense of self. This can include sexual practices, pornography, group sexual activity, or other acts that later leave the person feeling confused, degraded, humiliated, or ashamed.

The significance of this extends beyond the sexual encounter itself. The resulting shame can become a powerful mechanism of control. Survivors may fear judgment from family, friends, faith communities, police, courts, or professionals if the details become known. So they stay silent.

They may worry that attention will be focused on what they did rather than the circumstances under which it occurred.

In this way, shame does not simply emerge as a consequence of abuse. It can become part of the abuse itself.

The perpetrator’s power is maintained not only through the original coercion but through the survivor’s fear of how their actions will be interpreted if they disclose what happened.

More recently, Australian research found that 10.2% of adults admitted pressuring someone for dates or sex, 6% reported using emotional or psychological manipulation to obtain sexual activity, and 4% reported pressuring someone to consume alcohol or drugs before seeking sexual activity (Doherty & Dowling, 2024).

The message from the research is remarkably consistent.

Sexual coercion is rarely about physical force. More often, it involves creating conditions where resistance becomes increasingly difficult and compliance becomes increasingly likely.

Yet this understanding has not always translated into professional practice.

As a counsellor working with victim-survivors, I have sat in rooms where police officers have diligently worked through assessment checklists, asking whether a survivor consented to specific sexual acts, including asking “did you consent to be strangled”.

I need to be clear - I do not blame officers for asking these questions. They are often following the frameworks they have been trained to use.

The difficulty is that sexual consent cannot be understood without understanding coercion.

As practitioners, we also need to recognise that many victim-survivors answer questions literally. I remember the first time I was asked whether the pastor came to my house.

I answered yes. Simply yes. That is all they got.

What I was never asked was how I felt when he turned up at my house.

• I was never asked whether I felt fear.

• I was never asked whether I felt obligated to let him in because he was my pastor.

• I was never asked whether I felt I had a genuine choice to refuse.

• I was never asked what it might have meant for me spiritually, socially, or emotionally if I had said no.

• I was never asked if my empathy, compassion and kindness were being used against me.

• I was never asked about the confusion and chaos he was creating for me.

• No one asked how many times the pastor was contacting me each day.

• No one asked me how it interrupted my study, work, family life or relationship with my friends.

• No one asked whether there was a pattern of increasing intrusion into my life.

• No one asked what happened when I didn’t respond.

• No one asked whether he asked me to keep secrets.

• No one asked whether he did things that made me feel unsafe, uncomfortable, or confused.

• No one asked whether his behaviour mirrored that of someone seeking a intimate relationship rather than a pastor concerned for his ‘flock’.

• No one assessed my level of distress.

• No one assessed my suicidality.

• No one asked how much of my emotional world had become consumed by his pursuit of me.

No one asked me why my behaviour had changed - because probably…. they didn’t recognise it!

• No one asked why I no longer sat in the same place at church.

• No one asked why I spent most of my time in the teen church out of the service.

• No one asked me why I didn’t go out with all the young adults / older teenagers after the Sunday night service.

• No one asked why I stopped dressing like many of the other older teenagers or young adults around me who appeared to be going to a wedding every Sunday.

• No one asked whether I was deliberately trying to make myself less visible.

• No one asked whether I was trying to avoid attention.

Importantly:

No one asked whether my faith had become part of the coercion.

If they had, I may have told them (oh, how I longed to tell someone if they asked)

• How the "relationship” was presented to me as God’s will for my life.

• How spiritual language was used to override my doubts, concerns, and boundaries.

• How I came to believe I would be disobeying God if I said no, if I didn’t answer his calls, if I didn’t meet him when he requested, or if I failed to do what he told me to do.

• I may have told them what was happening to me during church services. At the time, I genuinely believed I was possessed. I felt like I had become a spider crawling up the walls of the church and looking down from the lights above the stage. I now understand that experience as dissociation. At the time, I had no language for it.

• I may have told them how trapped I felt.

• I may have told them I could no longer make a decision for my life without brining it to ‘leadership’ for permission.

• I may have told them how I was told that I was “the curse” responsible for a child developing cancer. Somehow the Old Testament language of blessings and curses became my burden to carry. Mine, no one else’s.

• How I became terrified that if I spoke about what was happening, my parents would never be saved and would burn in hell.

• How I felt unable to disclose because members of the wider church community referred to me as “the Jezebel who seduced my pastor into sin”. A statement that still confuses me today, considering he denies any wrongdoing. What exactly was I supposed to have seduced him into?

No one asked about any of this.

So the simple answer of “yes” came out of my mouth,

I told them that “yes” that he turned up to my house.

It told them nothing about the power dynamics and fear operating underneath that interactions.

This is one of the limitations of incident-based assessments. They often focus on what happened without exploring the context in which it happened.

The same issue arises when victim-survivors are asked whether they consented to a sexual act.

If asked whether they consented, they may find it difficult to answer that question. They may not have physically resisted, they may have frozen, dissociated or felt fear, they may have believed there was no realistic alternative in that moment than to comply, and than to stay silent.

In highly coercive environments, saying no may not feel like a genuine option at all.

A simple yes-or-no answer tells us very little about the context in which that decision was made.

It is why pattern based assessment is so imperative.

• How did the friendship begin?

• How fast the friendship escalated into the first sexual act?

• Was there any ways you were made to feel special?

• Was there a history of making you feel bad for not agreeing with them?

• Was there fear of consequences for refusing to do what they asked?

• Had boundaries been systematically eroded over time?

• Was alcohol routinely introduced before sexual encounters?

• Had the survivor learned that saying no would result in punishment, conflict, humiliation, withdrawal of affection, accusations, or further abuse?

• Did they genuinely feel free to refuse?

• Were previous sexual acts later used as a source of shame, blackmail, or humiliation?

• Was the perpetrator threatening to expose intimate details, sexual behaviour, or a person’s sexuality?

• Were secrets being used to maintain silence?

• Was affection alternated with punishment?

• Was spiritual authority, professional authority, therapeutic authority, or relational dependency being used to secure compliance?

• What did the survivor believe would happen if they resisted?

These questions move us beyond a narrow assessment of individual incidents and towards an understanding of how power and control operate across time.

These are not peripheral questions. They are central to understanding whether consent was freely given.

When we focus solely on a survivor’s answer to a single question, we risk missing the broader pattern of power, control, and coercion that shaped that response.

The same is true with investigations. Too often, investigations focus on whether a person consented to a particular act. But that question alone tells us very little. A more useful question is to examine the conditions under which that consent was obtained, shaped, or even fabricated. Understanding consent requires understanding the context in which choices were made and whether those choices were genuinely free.

This distinction matters because many victim-survivors carry enormous shame about what happened to them.

Survivors already judge themselves enough based on their actions during the abuse. They wonder why they couldn’t yell no, they wonder why it appears like they were going along with it, not fighting back, returning to the relationship, answering messages, continuing to meet with the perpetrator, or complying with demands they never would have accepted under different circumstances.

These memories often become evidence against themselves.

Perpetrators frequently rely on this self-blame because it shifts attention away from the coercive conditions that shaped those behaviours and onto the survivor’s response to them.

But compliance under coercive conditions is not the same as freely given consent.

This is one reason why coercive control legislation and pattern-based assessments represent such an important development. They move us away from viewing abuse as a collection of isolated incidents and towards understanding how power operates across time.

Yet even within coercive control conversations, spiritual sexual servitude and sexual coercion often remains underexplored.

We have become increasingly sophisticated at identifying things like financial abuse, stalking, surveillance, and isolation. We are less comfortable discussing the ways perpetrators use sex, shame, affection, alcohol, guilt, obligation, spiritual fear to maintain control.

If practitioners, police, lawyers, judges, researchers, and policymakers are serious about understanding sexual violence, then we must move beyond narrow incident-based assessments of consent.

We must begin examining the broader context in which sexual decisions are made.

And until we understand coercion, many forms of sexual violence will continue to be reduced and minimised.

Adapted from my Master of Philosophy but with my own personal story.

Simpson, J. (2024). Broken, Shattered and Spiritually Battered: Understanding Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse in Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian Faith Communities (Master of Philosophy thesis, Queensland University of Technology).