Half of young adults favour prison time for removing condom during sex

Removing a condom without someone’s consent, which is known as “stealthing,” has emerged as a “sex trend”. It has recently been punished as a form of rape.

Nearly all young people in the UK who took part in a new survey agree that removing a condom without a partner’s consent during sex is wrong, and almost nine in 10 say that it’s sexual assault.
A smaller number of people – roughly half – supported prison time for non-consensual condom removal, with the respondents being more likely to support such a penalty in a scenario where the female partner got pregnant afterwards.
The new survey published in the journal PLOS One is the first in the country on attitudes towards the practice some call a “sex trend”.
Known as “stealthing,” removing a condom before or during sexual intercourse without the permission of the other person is considered rape in England and Wales and has led to prison sentences three times in the UK.
The first such case was in 2019 when a man from Bournemouth was sentenced to 12 years in prison for removing a condom during intercourse with a female sex worker.
There have also been cases where stealthing has led to prison sentences in countries such as Germany or the Netherlands.
The new survey involved more than 1,700 people aged 18 to 25 who were provided with different scenarios of stealthing and asked their views on what had happened.
“I didn’t know what we would find. I was really pleased to see that most people saw it as a violation of consent and that they thought it was wrong. That was very reassuring [to see] in the population,” Dr Geraldine Barrett, senior author and a social scientist at University College London’s Institute for Women’s Health, told Euronews Health.
The survey focused on young people “because they’re the most likely condom users and… most of them aren’t wanting to get pregnant,” she added.
The respondents were provided with different scenarios. In one example, two partners were in a long-term sexual relationship when the man removed the condom during intercourse with a woman.
There were two potential outcomes – that the woman ended up pregnant or depressed.
When the outcome of stealthing resulted in an unplanned pregnancy, more than half of survey respondents (52 per cent) thought the man should serve prison time, whereas when the outcome was depression, fewer than half (42 per cent) thought he should.
“It’s not a big difference, but it is a slight difference,” Barrett said, explaining that the researchers wanted to look at what factors may influence how people judged its seriousness.
“In cases where victims do not discover they have been stealthed, their reproductive health is compromised as they are unable to procure emergency contraception and are therefore at a higher risk of unplanned pregnancy,” the authors explained.
Condoms are also used to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections.
In another scenario, the researchers compared people’s opinions based on the fictitious couple’s relationship status as either a casual hook-up or long-term dating.
More people thought the man should serve time in prison for removing a condom (54 per cent) when it was a casual hook-up rather than when the couple had been dating for a long time (47 per cent).
Ciara Bergman, CEO of Rape Crisis England and Wales, said in a statement provided to Euronews Health that the paper provided “important data” showing young people recognise that stealthing “fundamentally erodes consent”.
“It is essential to remember that the law recognises this as a form of rape,” she said.
When people give consent based on using a particular form of contraception such as a condom it “means that if you remove your condom without a person’s knowledge then you are actively violating the terms of their consent and as such, have committed a sexual offence,” she added.
Respondents who were female, LGBTQ, or born in the UK were more likely to view non-consensual condom removal as sexual assault. Female respondents were also more likely than male respondents to support prison time for stealthing.
There were several limitations to the study including that the survey sample was made up of university students and Instagram users and may not be generalisable to the wider population. The majority of participants were also White and cisgender.
“This is a first look, and this was about attitudes. I think the next step would probably be to look at who’s actually experiencing it and understanding that better,” Barrett said.
One such survey in Australia in 2018 found that a third of women and nearly one in five men who have sex with men had previously experienced it.