The Guardian
7.27.15 | Nosheen Iqbal
Apps, workshops and affirmative consent laws are being used to teach students the ‘yes means yes’ rule – that only clear, verbal agreement will do. Is there a crisis in consent?
Earlier this month, a Wall Street banker turned philosophy lecturer launched We-Consent, an app to help young people document when they’ve given one another explicit permission to, well, be explicit with each other. It follows Good2Go, the affirmative-consent app that was launched last September but removed from the Apple store within weeks, on grounds of “objectionable” content.
With We-Consent, both participants are encouraged to record video memos, naming themselves, the date, time and place they’ve given sexual consent, logging it for seven years in the event that one of them finds themselves accused of non-consensual behaviour afterwards. Immediately, most people over, say, 25 might find themselves questioning the app’s obvious flaws: first off, who would ever actually whip out their mobile to log the crucial moment before that crucial moment? What can filmed mutual agreement possibly mean when one or both parties have the right to change their un-filmed minds at any given point? Why is the basic human responsibility to understand the premise of yes or no being outsourced to an app?
But despite the ridicule both apps received, the consensus on campuses suggests that students aren’t so much facing a crisis of consent as standing a crisis down: even if the very modern ways in which consent awareness is being raised seem dumb and flawed, it’s not young people who are too stupid and too irresponsible to understand that no means no and yes means yes – it’s the generations before them. That much, at least, is clear from the reporting of cases where high-profile offenders have claimed “blurred lines”.
Several million sexual consent kits and contracts were distributed across campuses in the US by the Affirmative Consent Project last year. The rationale might seem bizarre and unromantic, but consent workshops are now mandatory for freshers at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the UK; the National Union of Students expects the majority of first-year British undergraduates to have sat in on one. This month, MP Caroline Lucas tabled a bill in parliament demanding compulsory sex and relationships education in schools, with clear guidelines on the subject of consent. In the same week, a blog on the “Consent is Sexy” campaign was shared 131,000 times on Tumblr. Clearly, sexual consent demands clarity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
