“Stop acting like a diva”: Responses to sexual violence in young adult romance novels

Abstract

Young Adult Literature (YAL) provides adolescents with cultural scripts for understanding gender, sexuality, and power, making it essential to examine portrayals of sexual violence and its aftermath. They can normalize sexual harm by suggesting that girls must manage violence on their own and that institutions will not intervene, or they can challenge rape culture by modeling resistance and accountability. This paper analyzes 20 popular YAL novels published between 2005 and 2013 using iterative inductive content analysis (ICA), an approach involving repeated cycles of reading, coding, and refining categories. I find that characters employ six tactics: saying no, joking, threatening violence, creating space, relocation, and violence, both independently and in combination when responding to sexual violence. Schools are portrayed as failing girls, treating sexual harassment as misunderstandings and dismissing girls as “divas” when they protest; notably, school discipline disproportionately targets Latino boys as perpetrators while excusing white boys, who more frequently commit sexual violence in this sample. Police are almost entirely absent, responding to sexual violence in only two texts. Collectively, these patterns demonstrate how young adult romance novels reproduce central assumptions of rape culture: that sexual violence is an individual rather than institutional issue, that resistance is constrained by gender, and that institutional accountability is not reliable.