Making Sense of Consent: A Qualitative Analysis of Australian Mock Juror Decision-Making in a Rape Trial

Jurors in rape trials often rely on stereotypical expectations about how a “real” victim-survivor should behave. Drawing on the Story Model for juror decision-making, this study examined how mock jurors constructed narrative accounts of consent, credibility, and responsibility in an alcohol-related acquaintance rape case. A total of N = 250 jury-eligible Australian community members read a written trial transcript and provided verdicts accompanied by open-ended explanations of their reasoning. These responses were analysed using a hybrid reflexive thematic analysis, combining an initial inductive phase with a subsequent deductive phase informed by the Story Model. Six themes were developed that shaped juror reasoning: (1) Intoxication as consent threshold, (2) Empathy, blame, and moral intuition, (3) Constructing credibility, (4) Proving the (un)provable, (5) Competing scripts of how consent should be communicated, and (6) Behaviour of a “real” or “legitimate” victim-survivor. Across themes, jurors sought narrative coherence by drawing on socio-culturally available scripts to make sense of ambiguous evidence. Consent and intoxication functioned as central organising elements in these stories, with a persistent double standard whereby intoxication mitigated the defendant’s responsibility while undermining the complainant’s credibility. Although some participants received judicial directions emphasising that there is no “typical” response to rape, such directions were rarely explicitly incorporated into jurors’ narratives. From a Story Model perspective, this suggests that judicial directions may struggle to displace pre-existing schemas when they are not integrated into jurors’ broader narrative sense-making. Overall, the findings highlight the resilience of rape myth-consistent narratives in juror reasoning and underscore the need for juror education and legal guidance that more directly engage with the narrative processes through which verdict decisions are constructed.