Congratulations Dr. Fletcher!! It looks like it was such a wonderful joyful day!

Do you want to help correct the belief that other youth won't want to talk about consent in your classroom? We're testing a method for that! Access it for free here and I'm happy to collaborate to try it in your classroom :) drive.google.com/drive/folder...

Our prior work showed similar findings in an autism-focused sample: young adults wanted verbal consent, but felt their peers wouldn't want to talk about it. But this feeling seems to be shared by many students, not just autistic youth. So, correcting misperceptions would probably help everyone!

You'll notice this is less autism-focused than my other work: My hope is to improve sex ed in neurodiverse classrooms - classes with both ND and NT kids, like we often see in schools. To help autistic kids, I think we need to improve sex ed for everyone, not just autism specific programs.

Thank you to everyone who made this paper possible, especially our incredible participants. As you’ll see in their quotes, they were so generous in sharing their experiences, and we are so grateful.

Across groups, students expressed they were pretty comfortable talking about consent but they had difficulty knowing whether they wanted to consent to sexual activity and navigating what to do when they felt ambivalent. Students also shared their (often negative) memories of sex ed.

Key findings 🧵: autistic young adults reported less satisfaction with their consent education and higher rates of sexual abuse in childhood. Qualitatively autistic students noted a theme of a delay prior to realizing their experiences were non consensual as well.