8% of female students report sexual contact without consent

A new survey of students has found that 8% of females and 3% of males were certain someone had sexual contact with them when they were unable to provide consent because they were drunk, passed out or otherwise incapacitated in the past year.

The survey of young people aged 18 to 29 also found that a similar percentage of women and men over the previous year were not certain, but still suspected that someone else had sexual contact with them when they could not give consent for the same reasons of being asleep, drunk or otherwise incapacitated.

The results of the survey, published by the School of Psychology at NUI Galway, is based on work conducted in 2015 and explored attitudes to sex and consent.