This is a slightly edited extract from Chapter 8 of It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent. You can buy the book from any online bookstore but if you buy it direct from the author all the profits go to her and none of your money goes to billionaires.
What is consent?
Consent is mutual, ongoing, and equally relevant whether you have known each other ten minutes or twenty years. All touching requires consent, not just sexual touch or penetrative sex.
Consent must be freely given, which means the consenting person wants to participate for their own reasons, based on their own wishes or inclinations. This is not to say that consensual sex must always be a response to sexual desire. Seeking intimacy, comfort, reassurance, physical contact, even relief from boredom are all entirely valid reasons for wanting sex. There are no right or wrong reasons for wanting, asking for or offering consensual sex.
Everyone involved needs to understand exactly what they are consenting to and what will happen before, during and after they have given their consent. As a teacher might explain to a class of six- year-olds, if you consent to lending your friend a book in class, they still have to ask you if they want to take the book home or before they draw on the pages. When that child is sixteen years old, a teacher might explain sexual consent, where someone who gives consent to kissing or touching over clothes does not necessarily consent to oral or penetrative sex. Each new activity and each new moment requires asking and giving consent.
Consent is often communicated non-verbally by touch and sound, but any uncertainty means asking for verbal consent. This doesn’t have to be incongruous to a passionate moment. ‘Do you like this?’ ‘How does this feel?’ ‘Do you want to keep going?’ ‘What do you like?’ ‘I’d like to keep going but it’s OK if you want to stop or take a break.’ ‘How do you feel about us doing this?’
Consent is enthusiastic and active. Everyone involved is eager to be part of what’s going on. A six-year-old is delighted to be playing chasey with the other kids in their class and says so. A seventeen- year-old is eager to kiss and touch their sexual partner, they want to know what their partner likes and are guiding and expressing their enjoyment.
Consent is ongoing and present from the moment the activity starts until after it ends. The six-year-old runs up to the other kids playing chasey and asks to join in. They’re laughing and excited throughout the game and continually showing they’re having a great time.
Everyone involved in an activity must have the capacity to give consent. They need to be conscious, coherent, able to understand what is happening and old enough to make the choice to participate.
Asking for, giving and communicating consent is the responsibility of everyone involved, but the onus for seeking consent is on the person who initiates touch or the person who has greater power in the relationship. There are some relationships, of course, where power is so inherently imbalanced that even asking for consent is prohibited. Doctors or therapists and their patients, teachers and their students, any adult and child are all relationships that preclude consent to sexual activity.
While it’s obviously important that teens understand the laws about sex and consent, understanding consent as a free choice is where legal definitions can be unhelpful. Only a very few of the things that constrain our choices or give us power over someone are illegal. Physical force or threats, being unconscious, or being too young to be able to consent are all against the law. Financial, emotional or social factors can give or remove power without being illegal. Other factors can be so ephemeral it can be difficult to recognise them as limits on our ability to consent. For example, far too many people in Australia know the feeling of teetering on the edge of homelessness. Always one delayed pay check or one twisted ankle away from losing their rental home or defaulting on their mortgage. Those people can’t always make truly free choices about sex with someone who has the power to either push them over that edge or pull them back from it. Even something like loneliness can interfere with our ability to give real consent. Can someone make a truly free choice to have sex if, in exchange they’re offered relief from crushing loneliness? There are so many other constraints on our ability to choose freely. All the expectations we think people have of us, the fears we have about ourselves and our futures, to say nothing of the sheer force of emotions such as lust, jealousy, love and infatuation.
It would be a very rare person who doesn’t have those limits on their choices at various times and with various people. That those limits exist doesn’t preclude asking for or consenting to sex. The solution is very simple – anyone seeking consent just need to make it clear that there is no risk in saying ‘no’, ‘not now’, ‘not like that’ or ‘not with you’.
Thank you for reading this slightly edited extract from Chapter 8 of It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent. You can buy the book from any online bookstore but if you buy it direct from the author all the profits go to her and none of your money goes to billionaires.
