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.
Power is simply having the ability to direct or influence the behaviour of other people or the course of events. The things that give us power are sometimes inherent in who we are or where we were born, which means we may not even notice them. Once I would have called this ‘privilege’, but it’s become such a loaded word that I stopped using it. Privilege is almost always interpreted to mean that someone has something they don’t deserve and didn’t earn. Not only is this rarely true, even the implication can cause resentment.
A white man from a stable, wealthy family and a private school background who becomes a cardiologist has to study for at least fifteen years. He must pass dozens of difficult exams, work long hours, stay up to date with every new piece of research, continually strive to improve his own skills and pass those skills on to junior doctors. He had to work incredibly hard. He didn’t just turn up to a hospital, wave his bank statement and his school tie at the Head of Cardiology and stroll off to the cardiac ward. On the other hand, his family connections and wealth may have made it easier to get into an ‘elite’ private school. It would also have helped give him access to tutors and other academic assistance when he needed it. If he had a calm, secure home and family who could help with financial and domestic support he would have no other demands on the time and energy his career required of him. And, of course, his family and professional connections would have helped him get prestigious fellowships because he had ‘the right background’.
The daughter of a refugee family, who had none of those things, might still become a cardiologist, but her journey will be much harder and take much longer. Her focus is likely to be split between her professional, financial and domestic responsibilities. She’ll have to continually prove not only her abilities but her right to use those abilities – her white male colleague is never asked to do this and probably doesn’t notice when it happens to her. The word privilege was supposed to describe those nuances, now it seems to erase them, so I prefer to talk about power.
Who has power? Why do they have it? What do they do with it? These are key questions to understanding almost every interaction between individuals, groups and even nations. People who have power can – and do – change the world. They can start wars or they can end them. They can free people or enslave them. Power itself is not good or bad. What someone chooses to do with it is everything. And how they got it matters too. Were they born into it? Did they strive for it? Did they lie, bully and manipulate people to get it? Did they get it from a lifetime of earning and deserving respect? Was it perhaps a mix of reasons because life is complicated and simple definitions are rarely accurate?
Having power doesn’t make someone a good or bad person. It just means you can do some things that other people can’t. A tool I’ve often used to demonstrate this is something that is immediately obvious about me – I’m quite tall. My height doesn’t tell people anything about my character, but it does mean I can reach things on high shelves and see over crowds. It’s also not something I had to work for or earn; it’s just how my genetic makeup and childhood environment shaped my bones. It’s useful at times, awkward at others, but because I have always been taller than most of the people my age, it is the only way I know how to see the world. It would, however, say a great deal about me if I used it, deliberately or thoughtlessly, to block other people’s view at a concert, or grab the last item from a shelf that a shorter person couldn’t reach. If I did such things, it would be my choices, not my height, that define my character and my values.
As both Spiderman and the Bible remind us, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’.
Physical size is one measure of power. There are many others, and children can be experts at recognising them, if only because they are so often powerless in their interactions with the adult world. They understand age and size immediately.
They understand disparity in age and size immediately, but social power is also immediately familiar to them. It’s often about popularity and the hierarchy of the schoolyard. As they get older, teens can develop a keen understanding of the power of wealth and the social capital of having the right clothes, devices, holidays and beauty treatments. The kids with high social status can condemn someone with less power to being ostracised, ridiculed and humiliated. This is something some teens take very seriously, and it cannot be dismissed with a ‘just ignore them’. A young woman, now in university, told me that when she was in Year 10 one of the boys got hold of a nude selfie she’d sent her then boyfriend. He used it to blackmail her into giving him oral sex and then used that to coerce her into more non-consensual sex (AKA: rape). ‘I can’t explain it,’ she told me. ‘It doesn’t make sense, “Give me a blow job or I’ll tell everyone you’re a slut” like, what does that even mean? But it felt so real at the time. I didn’t know what else to do.’
Emotional power is a common tool in sexual violence between partners. Usually in the form of an implied or even explicit threat to withhold love or affection. ‘I need to show you how much I love you or I can’t keep feeling this way.’ ‘I can’t keep touching you if you won’t let me finish.’ ‘If you won’t let me do it, I can easily find someone who will.’ ‘If you loved me as much as I love you, you’d want to do it too.’
Financial power as a tool of sexual harassment is often something we think of as an adult problem, but many teens have jobs and need money. This can include direct threats to get them fired, reduce their shifts or even assign them dirty or unsafe jobs. ‘Do you want to be walking home at midnight or taking all the rubbish out to the back alley?’ Indirect threats or more subtle uses of financial power can also be effective. ‘It’s dangerous for you to be on the train home by yourself. I can pay for an Uber for you later if you stay with me for a while.’ Financial power can also come from the ability to guilt, persuade or pressure someone into spending money, ‘I’m broke right now, so you’ll have to pay for me all night if we go out. Why don’t we just hang as my place instead?’
Psychological power, also known as gaslighting or coercive control if it’s ongoing, is about destabilising someone’s ability to trust themselves and hold onto what they really feel and think. ‘You’re so weird that you don’t want to.’ ‘What’s wrong with you? Everyone else loves it.’ ‘You’re so cold and frigid. Did something happen to you? Do you need to see a therapist or something?’ ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why can’t you see how much it hurts me?’
Pressure is where someone relentlessly nags until they get what they want. They know the other person doesn’t want to do what they’re asking, but they ‘win’ if they eventually get a reluctant ‘okay then’. This is often where we see the most confusion in teens who have been taught the yes/no binary of consent, because in this binary, someone did say yes. This is interpreted as indicating consent despite the clear lack of consent that underpins that ‘yes’.
The power of authority is something children are particularly vulnerable to because there are so many people who have authority over them. Priests who abused children or even adult parishioners were using the authority that came from their religious and social position. This power can also come from someone’s position as a teacher, carer, doctor, therapist, older family member, or anything else that could compel obedience, silence or respect.
Coercive power is when someone threatens, blackmails or bribes another person to prevent resistance. The coercion might be physical (‘Say yes or I’ll hurt you’) but it can also incorporate the other forms of power outlined above. The girl who was threatened with being labelled a slut if she didn’t comply was targeted by social and coercive power. It can also be framed as something beneficial, ‘If you say yes I’ll give you the concert tickets you so desperately want’ or ‘I’ll get you that camping trip invite you were hoping for’. Coercion, like pressure, can force a technical yes, but it is not consent.
Physical force is the traditional understanding of rape, where one person physically overpowers another. It can also include deliberately incapacitating someone (for example, spiking their drink to incapacitate them) opportunistically raping or sexually assaulting someone who is already incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, or physical violence that rendered them unconscious or too frightened to say no.
Other factors that can create power imbalances include race, neurotype, trauma history, sexuality, intellectual or athletic ability or, in same sex relationships, being out. These power imbalances outside gender can lead to non-consensual touching or sexual assault in LGBTIQA+ relationships as well as in heterosexual relationships.
Gender, of course, confers very different powers on boys, girls and non-binary kids. As I outlined in Chapter 5, children are very aware of gender roles and will often participate in doling out the rewards and punishments that police conformity even when they don’t believe the gender myths or want to conform themselves. Teenage boys can feel enormous pressure to prove their masculinity by displaying sexual prowess. When I was in my teens, boys would brag about ‘bagging babes’. A group of fourteen-year-old boys in 2025 told me they’d say, ‘clapping cheeks’ or having a ‘sneaky link’ and brag about their ‘body count’. The nomenclature has changed but the underlying purpose hasn’t changed for centuries – boys believe they win admiration and respect from other men by having lots of sex with lots of different girls.
Sexual standards for girls can be much more complex. They must walk the very wafer-thin and twisted line between being a ‘bop’ or ‘thot’ (slut) or ‘uptight’ (frigid), always knowing that these words and all their predecessors have only ever been used to shame and punish girls. This conflict often drowns out any consideration of sexual pleasure for girls, sometimes to the point where shame inhibits their ability to feel pleasure. If they believe that sex is something men do to women, or if they have absorbed shame about their bodies, they may not be able to talk comfortably about their own bodies and pleasure. They might silently comply with their partner’s wants or acts and not ask for or even expect mutual pleasure. This may not fit the legal definition of sexual assault, but it is not consensual either.
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.
