Consent requires absolute clarity
Alittle video on Youtube boils a vitally important issue down to a few simple truths. It contains some strong language, but it’s a fairly simple exposition on the mundane task of offering someone a cup of tea, and its parallels with another typical life situation.
If the offer of a cuppa is met with enthusiastic acceptance, naturally you’d get right on with making it. If they were ambivalent, you might still make them a cup of tea, but if they then didn’t want it, you certainly wouldn’t force them to drink it.
If their response to the offer was ‘‘No, thank you’’, you would accept that, not try to change their mind.
You probably know where this is going. The video traverses other scenarios, like knocking on someone’s door and insisting they want a cup of tea because they wanted one the day before. It’s called ‘‘Tea Consent’’, and addresses an issue at the forefront of the national consciousness following the trial of the man convicted of the murder of British tourist Grace Millane.
The definition of consent, and the explanation of the conditions surrounding it, are just as simple on the Family Planning website. ‘‘Consent is when both people say and show ‘yes’ to an activity. Sex or sexual acts without consent is [sic] sexual violation. It’s never OK.’’ How about this one? ‘‘Rape is sex without consent.’’
Pretty darn clear.
So why does consent keep emerging as so pivotal in trials involving sexual violence and, all too often, murder. The acquittal on a rape charge of New Zealand cricketer Scott Kuggeleijn, in his second trial in 2017, came despite his admission the woman he had sex with said no at least twice. ‘‘I tried
[having sex] twice, like she might have said ‘no, no’ a few times but it wasn’t dozens of times,’’ he said. An apology text sent to the woman the next day included the words ‘‘. . . looking back I was pretty persistent’’.
Long before it became a key plank in the defence case in New Zealand’s most-watched trial this year, the ‘‘sex game gone wrong’’ defence had cropped up in numerous murder trials in Britain, the Guardian reported.
Central to many such defences is the implication the woman has died as a result of a consensual ‘‘rough sex’’ game, often involving strangulation, or ‘‘breath play’’.
She has allegedly consented, though there’s no way to test that. A website created to collate accounts of these defences in Britain is called ‘‘We Can’t
Consent To This’’.
In the wake of trials like the two mentioned, it’s surely time we had a national conversation about how, and when, we teach the concept of consent.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that, at the point when children are first taught about sex, consent is part of the conversation, preferably the first point.
Yes, we desperately need to make this clear to boys, to prevent them becoming the men who don’t know what explicit, enthusiastic consent looks like, but girls must know too, and feel empowered to say no emphatically.
It’s not a subject just for teachers, or parents; it’s a subject all influential adults in kids’ lives should address, not pass the buck on, and it should happen early, before kids’ boundary-pushing sees them dabbling with easily accessed pornography and forming their views on sex, and consent, from that.