Australians overwhelmingly agree that “stealthing” – the non-consensual removal of a condom during sex – should be a crime, but more work needs to be done to make people familiar with the term, new research has found.
Stealthing is explicitly criminalised in four Australian jurisdictions – Tasmania, NSW, and Victoria following the lead of the ACT – with Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia either considering legislation or reviewing sexual assault legislation for gaps.
Proponents for its uniform criminalisation across the nation, including the director of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Sex and Gender Equality, Chanel Contos, say laws against stealthing help reduce sexual violence, because people are then able to recognise it as an assault.
“Stealthing is a particularly intricate type of sexual violence because the definition, by default, means that you have consented to having protected sex with the perpetrator, meaning you probably had positive feelings towards that person,” Contos said.
Contos said the introduction of the national curriculum on consent and respectful relationships and nationally consistent laws on stealthing “will facilitate education and public awareness that stealthing is a form of sexual assault”.
Contos met with the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, on Wednesday to discuss the issue.
A spokesperson for Dreyfus said the federal government was working with the states and territories to strengthen and harmonise laws related to sexual assault and consent and he was guiding a national discussion on the issues with his state and territory counterparts.
Research from Dr Brianna Chesser from RMIT University and Sienna Parrott from the Australia Institute found familiarity with both the term and its legal status in the states and territories was low, but most Australians supported its criminalisation.
Despite the increased presence of the term stealthing in popular culture, such as in Michaela Coel’s acclaimed series I May Destroy You, familiarity with it remains low in Australia, Chesser and Parrott found.
While four in five Australians (81%) agreed stealthing should be a crime, 65% in the same poll said they were not familiar with the term. Of the 35% who said they were familiar with it, only 15% correctly identified its definition.
When it came to identifying whether or not stealthing was a crime in their state or territory, 56% of the poll recipients didn’t know.
Chesser, a criminal lawyer and clinical forensic psychologist and a senior lecturer in criminology and justice at RMIT, said criminalising stealthing reinforced the social condemnation of the act.
One of the issues the research found was there were no comprehensive estimates of how common stealthing was in Australia. Low rates of understanding led to low rates of reporting, but victims were at risk of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy, and the psychological trauma of having an act perpetrated against them without their consent.
A 2018 Monash University study that surveyed people who attended a Melbourne sexual health clinic found 32% of women and 19% of men who had sex with men had experienced stealthing. Only 1% had reported the act to police.
That study found female sex workers were at particular risk and were more than three times likely than other women attending the clinic to have experienced stealthing.
While there has been growing awareness of stealthing as an act of assault, researchers believe education across Australia following its criminalisation will be key to stopping it.
