FailBluedot.com
7.7.15
Last year, the idea of affirmative consent was first put into place by some US college campuses. This sparked a lot of discussion, some good and some, ahem, “sub-optimal”. Maybe we’ll remember 2014 as the year of the rape singularity that signalled a change in the way culture and law treat rape. As expected, a lot of conservatives were absolutely outraged. The main arguments being that this allegedly erodes due process for the defendant, that it turns the presumption of innocence into a presumption of guilt, that it is unrealistic and that it could criminalise most sexual encounters.
I don’t think the sky is falling, so I’ll try to explain what a legal and social culture of affirmative consent would look like. The whole post is not referring to any specific legal system, so much of this might already be reality in some systems.
From the point of view of the law, affirmative consent would mean that it is the legal responsibility of each participant in a sexual activity to obtain meaningful consent from all others. Basically if you’ve had sex with someone and haven’t obtained consent, you have then committed rape. Now, I’d imagine most statutes are written in language similar to the above, but in practice there is a lot of cultural (and some legal) precedents for the “they didn’t say no” defence. In an affirmative consent paradigm, this would be right out. Not saying no, not struggling and so on would not be taken as a sign of consent.
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