Don’t over simplify consent

In our research for the DO… RSE for Schools project a young person said about their sex education: “[t]hey just say ‘just say no’ but sometimes people don’t feel confident to do that.” Over simplifying consent to a ‘just say no’ or ‘wait for an enthusiastic yes’ message is not likely to be helpful. Consent is an extremely complicated topic. It relates to how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to others. It is also about what culture tells us what we should and shouldn’t do.

Young people said to us that RSE was best delivered when young people were asked to think about things themselves. Simply being told what to think in a lecture isn’t real or relevant for them. This is because it won’t give them the tools to help them in real life.

Don’t just tell people what consent is but let people practice it

Just giving a legal definition of consent, or showing a brief video, is one way of teaching about consent. However, much more useful would be for people to actually practice consent. If you can bring in experiential learning activities then students can learn: about what makes negotiation difficult. How asking for our needs to be met can be tricky. They can learn how to handle power differences. What it feels like to meet your own and other people’s needs and, exploring the messages we get from society about this.

You could try the handshakes activity which has comprehensive instructions, pro-tips and helpful slides. This is part of the consent lesson but is part of a broader curriculum looking at:

• How we feel about ourselves
• Expectations placed on us around gender
• Relationships and love
• Consent and communication
• Safer sex

Another experiential activity you could try is my ‘Choose Chocolate’ exercise in my Consent Teaching Pack. This is where participants get to practice tuning into what they want and learning how to meet their needs and others.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Open up conversations exploring the difficulties

In my experience young people (and not so young people) love talking about consent in detail. It can bring up so much around social norms, ethics, politics, gender, power, and structural inequality. Good RSE needs to allow people to reflect on, to consider, and to change or build upon their values or ethics. There’s an example of consent conversations at my website for young people BISH about this. Also there’s an extended version of that is available in my Consent Teaching Pack.

Article continues after this ad for my resources (why not buy some?!) They’re also available at the BISH Patreon Shop.

Don’t just make it about the person saying no

It’s vitally important that we don’t reinforce some of the problematic messages about consent when we teach about consent. We certainly should not be putting the emphasis on people to be saying no. This puts the responsibility on victims of assault and not on perpetrators. Whilst we can say that it should be okay to say no, and to give people some tools to help them do this, we should be spending more time teaching everyone about how to recognise and respect a no. And, importantly how to increase the opportunities for others to say no to us.

Bring in media and messages

You could ask students to critically review famous film clips and ask them to explore how the characters are relating to each other around consent. Maybe also ask students to think about the messages that mainstream and sexually explicit media sends out about consent, choices and agency.

It’s important not to do this as a way of exonerating perpetrators of sexual violence (ie it was looking at porn that made me do it). However we can look at the sources of consent education we have and consider how useful they all are. Media reflects but also reinforces the dominant narratives we have around power, gender, sexuality, relationships, and ourselves. Critiquing this is important because, as academic Ros Gill says, we can’t escape culture. Much of our culture does not encourage consensual practices with each other or with ourselves.

Talk about power

One of my many criticisms of the use of the Tea and Consent video is that it doesn’t really address power differences in relationships. My key point was that if Nigella Lawson made me an awful cup of tea then I would feel that I had to drink all of it because a) what I’m taught about politeness and b) I want her to like me.

As we saw in the recent iteration of #metoo activism, consent and power differences are intertwined. People were made more vulnerable to sexual assaults and rapes because a lot was at stake for them if they didn’t (their careers and livelihoods) and their attackers knew this. This is something that affects all of us, whether we are in Hollywood or not.

We all have different levels of power and privilege because society gives some people more status than others because of their identity (race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, age etc). We can also experience differences in power in a relationship if, for example, one of us is more confident or experienced than another. Because of this, it’s harder for some people to ask for what they want (or what they don’t want) from sex and relationships. This has to be part of what we teach about consent.

What is sex

Make sure that ‘sex’ is not just intercourse but can include a wide range of practices. Even if you teach some really great stuff about consent, it will be undermined if you don’t teach inclusive and holistically about what sex actually is. Sex is about diverse sexual practices that people may or may not enjoy. It’s not just about intercourse or penis in vagina sex. If you teach that that’s what sex is, then as well as excluding everyone in society who can’t have that kind of sex, you are also sending a non-consensual message about what kind of sex is acceptable and expected.

Model it

We can be bringing good consensual practice into the classroom even when we aren’t teaching about consent. We can enshrine these by having a group agreement whenever we do RSE (but why stop at RSE). However we can also bring this in with different teaching methods.

When putting people into small groups we could ask students if they want to be put into groups or whether they choose their own groups. Small groups means that some students can feel more comfortable participating than in larger groups. When asking people for contributions you could ask open questions and not put people on the spot. You can also subtly give people the option not to participate in a lesson, or in an aspect of a lesson, if they might find it uncomfortable. For example in the handshakes lesson, people could be observers of other people shaking hands rather than taking part in handshakes themselves.

Of course, if you want to go there, you could talk about how consensual it is that students have to be in your classroom, or at school at all. What would consensual schooling look like?

It’s not just in the classroom but look at the culture of the school

How can we bring more consent and choice into the fabric of the school, rather than just in the lessons. This involves looking at policy and practice around things like: reports of harassment and bullying; and safety and inclusion. It’s also about creating positive relationships within schools so that there are enough adults with good relationships with students that every student feels they have someone they can talk to.

So why not have a look at DO… today and use the resources in your teaching this year. They are free and top quality, even though I do say so myself. If you would like more or alternative resources about consent, try my Consent Teaching Pack. 

The post Top Tips for Teaching About Consent appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

Tyranny of Tea – societal pressure

The tea video goes straight into the interaction about whether someone wants tea or not. However it would be really useful to first of all point out the tyranny of tea and how it seems to be so essential to our very existence. We all receive messages (particularly in the UK and Ireland) about the importance of tea: ‘we’re a nation of tea drinkers’, ‘let’s sort the problem out over a cup of tea’, the national institution of afternoon tea. Even one of the UK national sports has a break specifically to drink the stuff.

This also plays out with the people around us which: ‘the kettle’s on’, ‘there’s tea in the pot’, ‘we’re all having tea’, ‘I’m having a brew do you want one’, ‘go on have a cup of tea’. It’s presented as such a benevolent, harmless and normal thing that we can feel very abnormal for not wanting tea – or any hot caffeinated drinks at all – which puts us under a lot of pressure to get used to drinking it (even if we really don’t like it).

Same with sex right? Sex is seen as such a benevolent, healthy and normal activity that everyone is expected to do it. To not want sex at all: because someone isn’t interested, or wants sex in a committed relationship, is practicing celibacy, or is asexual is seen as so unusual that people receive tremendous stigma about it.

Tea is for everyone – sex isn’t

However although pretty much everyone is expected to drink tea, and receives status if they do so, it’s not the same for sex. Only some people are seen as being able to have sex (e.g. not disabled and over 16 but under 50) and some people get status for doing it and some stigma. When we factor in all of our different identities (e.g. genders, sexual identities, age, race, class, disability, HIV status, etc) we might find that sometimes we are given more or less status or stigma around our sexuality depending on our oppressions and privileges.

Often this is played out between what men are taught about sex (e.g. lad points, real man, stud, men love sex all the time) and what women are taught (e.g. slut, slag, sket, women are not meant to like it). But think about all the other messages that people hear from different groups and add them all together if this applies. These powerful messages come from everywhere and are played back to us from an early age until now, sometimes consciously and directly but often not. They are very difficult to escape or deal with or process and they can have a huge affect on our sexual decision making and our sense of agency.

If we factor in another person (or people) here then we can see that we may often have more or less power in a sexual encounter – we need to be able to have a sense of this with the people around us, in all encounters, not just sexual. However because of the seeming convergence of sex and relationships (the idea that we ‘must’ have sex if we are in a relationship and that the only time sex is allowed is when we are in a relationship) this also means that there is often a difference in power in relationships too. I’ll reflect on this a bit later on.

What counts as tea – normative scripts

If I ask for ‘a cup of tea’ in the UK I know what I’m going to get: English/Irish breakfast blend with some milk. There’s a very strong script of what counts as tea – anything else is a bit exotic, or specialist, or frankly sometimes just not tea. Maybe you might get asked how strong you like tea (how much milk you want), or how many sugars, but that’s it.

Same with sex right? A huge part of consent is recognising that the choices we make are massively restricted by the messages about what it is that we are allowed to do. Sex is penis in vagina sex: anything else is seen as exotic, specialist or frankly just not sex. This kind of sex is the only game in town and we’re under a lot of pressure to do it even if we don’t want to. And of course if we don’t have the bodies that can do penis in vagina sex then we are excluded altogether.

Not saying no – power in relationships

Like many people I often imagine Nigella Lawson asking if I’d like a cup of tea. I don’t think that I could do anything other than say ‘yes please, I’d love a cup of tea’ even if I didn’t actually want a cup of tea. I don’t think there’s any way I could be cool and say something like:

‘sure, what kind of tea do you have in mind’
‘how are you going to brew it’
‘are you having the same or would you like me to make you something different?’

I’d just nervously agree to the tea because I really really fancy her and just want her to like me (or for her not to dislike me).

I think if the tea arrived and I didn’t like how she brewed it (e.g. she used a tea bag and even put the milk in before taking the tea bag out) I think I would drink the tea anyway. I think I would even pretend it was a really great cup of tea even if I thought it was terrible. I’d probably make sure to drink all of it even if it was a giant seemingly endless mug of tea. I wouldn’t want her to think that I didn’t enjoy it and I’d also feel guilty about not drinking a cup of tea that someone had offered me and spent some time preparing even though I didn’t want it in the first place.

In the tea video there’s nothing about the power of societal and cultural scripts and messages about what counts as tea, but there’s also nothing about the power in interpersonal relationships. Interactions about whether people have sex or not often involve higher stakes than negotiations about a cup of tea and often the stakes can be higher for one person than it is for another.

In my example about me and Nigella, to her offering a cup of tea might be a kind but mundane gesture, to me it would mean something entirely different as it might mean acceptance or interest from a famous person I fancy a lot. Imagine how I would feel if Nigella asked me out on a date!

But enough about Nigella and me (*swoon*), power exists where people know each other too. For example in a long term cohabiting relationship turning down a cup of tea, or asking for a different kind of tea or different kind of drink altogether, or having a cup of tea given to you even if you didn’t ask for one is no big deal. But if we substitute tea for sex here, it can be a huge deal. Also the pressure to have sex in a ‘love’ relationship is huge and often people think that because they are in love they should have sex – whenever their partner wants. Or sometimes the word love can be used to coerce people into sex: ‘but I thought you loved me?’

We can’t step outside of the messages of culture and society but it’s also difficult to step out of the almost inevitable power differences between people and this can have a huge impact on how much agency we feel we have. We can see that this stuff is actually quite complicated. It’s also about far more than just yes or no.

Tea might be yes/no but sex isn’t

One of the biggest problems when we over simplify conversations about consent is when we boil it down to a one time yes or no negotiation. I’ve worked with and listened to many many people (thousands) about consent and sexual encounters and it’s clear to me that we need much more than a yes means yes and no means no understanding of consent. From the student who said: “so if two people have sex and neither of them says yes or no, is it consensual sex?” to the woman who when I asked whether sex was consensual or not she said “yeah I didn’t say no, so it wasn’t rape.” On the one hand of course yes means yes and no means no, and the absence of a no does not mean a yes, but we all need much more than this very simple message to understand how consent feels for us and how to practice it.

The ability to use words to get and give consent is great for people who are confident enough to say ‘would you like to have sex?’ or ‘yes I would like to have sex’. But many people just aren’t able to do that – see above about agency, power and who is allowed to have sex. Even if people were able to do this, that agreement only applies at that fixed moment in time. Tea might be a one off decision resulting in a binary result of having tea/not having tea, but sex isn’t.

Checking in and paying attention

So going back to Nigella. I’d like to think that she’s pretty cool and understands that there is a power dynamic going on and that even though I said ‘yes’ to the tea I might actually be pretending to enjoy it.

So I reckon she might pay really close attention to whether I really wanted the tea: how enthusiastic was I in my response, did I seem happy when she put the mug down, what my facial expressions are when I’m drinking it, am I making noises indicating enjoyment, how quickly I’m drinking it, how much I drank. I think she’d check in with me afterwards too. I’d like to think that at any point if I seemed unhappy she’d offer to make me another drink, or very gently give me permission to leave it, or not make a big thing about not taking it with me when we move into another room.

Maybe you could try this the next time you have a cup of tea with someone?

Sexual consent isn’t a one time yes, no negotiation. It’s a constant series of decisions, negotiations and communications. If someone has clearly and verbally agreed to sex, or whether they are following a script for sex (e.g. kissing, ‘foreplay’, penis in vagina), it’s important to keep paying attention to them and to check in if we’re not sure that they are enjoying it, or at least not not enjoying it. This is where the tea analogy really falls down in my view.

Closes down conversation

Many people have said that it’s not a perfect analogy but at least it opens up the conversation about consent. Mmmm maybe. I think the tone of the blog and the tone of the video are kind of different. The video implies that consent is all very simple: if someone doesn’t want tea don’t give them tea, if someone is asleep they can’t consent to tea, don’t give them tea. In my view the tone of the video is there are smart people who get this and there are stupid people that don’t.

I don’t think so. I think it’s totally possible to understand this view of consent but also to act in a non-consensual way. I think it’s also good to reframe the ‘they’ to a ‘we’ because I think the video creates this idea of an ‘other’ or a ‘them and us’. We are all capable of behaving in consensual and non-consensual ways when it comes to sex, bodily contact and social situations – all of us.

If we’re sleeping over with someone how to check if we can touch each other in the middle of the night. Knowing what to do with our hands when snogging. Not touching people on the dancefloor or at a gig without any communication that that is what they wanted. Hearing other people when they say they don’t want another drink. Respecting people when they want to stay in. Asking if holding hands or hugging is okay. Being able to ask open questions rather than closed ones. Understanding that it’s harder for some people to say what they want for dinner than others. Asking before we touch or hug people.

Why doesn’t this work as a sex education tool? It’s simplistic but it’s also just about knowledge. I think it’s completely possible for someone to remember every word of the video and not behave consensually. Good sex and relationships education is about skills (e.g. communication), values (e.g. understanding power difference) and our own feelings (e.g. what it feels like for someone to really respect what you want). The tea thing isn’t very people centred. If you’re going to run a workshop or a class about consent you need to give people an opportunity to really explore their own actions and how this feels for them. It’s maybe a useful thing to share on social media and say ‘have you seen this?’ but really, has it helped you to understand consent? Has the way you’ve though about consent changed? Have your behaviours changed at all after watching the video?

Folk are tired of just being told what to think. Good SRE is about giving people the space to think critically and a safe space to reflect on their own stuff. This is why I prefer working with an experiential learning method around consent – such as handshakes, which Meg John Barker and I have been working on. Go and check it out, it’s totally free. MJ and I have done this with therapists, teachers, youth workers, academics, young people at school and Uni and even paying members of the general public – it works really well.

If you’re working with over 14s you might want to sign up for free support, resources and lesson plans (written by me and Alice Hoyle with advice and guidance from Meg John) to deliver a unique six week SRE programme which is all about self (and power), what is expected of us, love, consent and reducing risk. Check out DO… it’s all free.

For a post about how consent might feel go here, for how to put that into practice go here,

If you’d like to book a training course with me on consent for up to 16 people go here. Or if you would like me to come and teach it in person go here.

Since I wrote this there have been a couple of really interesting academic articles about this and consent teaching generally.

From Date Rape Jeopardy to (Not) Drinking Tea

Dilemmas of school-based relationships and sexuality education for and about consent

The post “Have You Seen That Tea and Consent Video?” appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

This is an activity that I came up with and Meg-John Barker and I have been using and developed in the last few years. I’ve used it in sex education with young people and adults, Meg-John has used it in training courses with therapists and we’ve both used it at seminars. We’ve found it a really useful exercise as it opens up lots of discussion about how we ask for our needs to be met as well as understanding some of the barriers for this. It works as an analogy for sexual consent, but it’s also interesting to think about how we do and don’t consent to greetings in everyday life.

For full instructions on how to use this activity, as well as a comprehensive slideshow to help you to deliver it, you should check out my new Consent Teaching Pack, which contains several other interactive and in-depth activities about consent, negotiation and power. You can buy it here or at the BISH Patreon Shop.

We also really enjoy using this as we learn from it every time we facilitate it – we hope you like it too. We’ve also massively improved our greetings whenever we meet up (a good firm hug, lasting for about 2 seconds).

If you would like me to come to your school or college or youth club to teach this you can book me here. You might also be interested in my new training course about it here.

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30/60 minutes – over 14 possibly works better for an older group or a group who are more likely to be sexually active (or considering being sexually active)

AIM

To explore what consent may feel like and exploring what makes getting and giving consent easier and harder.

WHAT IS THIS?

It takes teaching about consent beyond a very simple legalistic message such as ‘no means no’ and gives people the opportunity to experience the barriers and opportunities for experiencing consent in a safer environment.

This is a simple sounding activity but it is potentially quite a powerful one and a tricky one to get right. It can open up a lot of discussion so it may need a bit of guidance to take it to where you need it to go. I’ve provided wording which I’ve found works for me. If you direct the discussion quite firmly you can do this in 30 minutes. If you allow the discussion to roam a little it can take longer (which might be good to do in a training course).

LEARNING POINTS

Experience and practice negotiation and agreement

Develop communication skills around boundaries, wants and needs

Understand how competing narratives around sex (and handshakes) can make consent harder to experience

METHOD

This involves asking everyone to shake hands and there will a total of three rounds of handshakes! Although people may feel like they should take part in the handshakes (which might be one of the learning points of the activity) please don’t explicitly force people to do so.

Handshake One

Explain to the group “This is a lesson about consent and what that means. First of all I’d like everyone to shake hands, if you want to.”

Give enough time for as many people to shake hands with as many people as they like. Once everyone has settled back down …

Ask the group the following questions and try to make sure different views are heard. At this point the participants will still be a bit wary of what’s going on, so you might want to keep this part of the discussion a bit shorter.

“how was that?” (answers here may be quite short “ok” “all right”)

“how was it to other handshakes you’ve had?”

“what’s the secret to a great handshake?” (people might talk about firmness, or the context – eg who’s doing the handshake and when)

“on a scale of one to ten how was it?” (usually this gets between 4 and 7)

Then explain that you would like them to shake hands again …

Handshake Two

Explain the following …

“This time I’d like you to shake hands again but I’d like you negotiate it.”

“Do you want to shake hands with left or right hand?” [you might want to ask if there are any left handed people in the room and which hand they shake with]

“Do you want to go up and down or side to side?”

“How firm do you want it to be? Negotiate this on a scale of 1 to 10”

“How long would you like it to go on for, or how many shakes would you like?”

“Do you want to dry your hands first?”

“Do you want to do something else altogether? A fist bump? A shoulder bump? A hug? A kiss on the cheek (no tongues)?”

Then allow everyone who wants to to shake hands again, notice what happens in the room (there’s often more laughter and smiling, it also takes longer). Then ask the following questions …

“how was that?” (answers here may a bit longer than the first time round, generally speaking lots of people prefer it)

“how was it to other handshakes you’ve had?”

“on a scale of one to ten how was it?” (usually this gets between 6 and 9)

“how did it compare to the first handshake?” (people often say “it was more mutual,” “we knew what was going to happen,” “it was more fun” “there was more eye contact”)

“did anyone prefer the first handshake?” (try to convince people that this isn’t a trick question – it’s important that people feel they can say they did. They might say “it was less awkward,” “it was over more quickly,” “it was more fun,” “it was more exciting not knowing how it was going to be.”)

“So neither ‘first handshake’ or ‘second handshake’ is ideal. Instead we could try being more ‘third handshake.’

Third Handshake

To explore how people can incorporate the best of both handshakes and to think of how they do this. So explain

“I’d like you to shake hands for one last time, but this time I’d like you to try and get a balance between first handshake and second handshake. Try to keep it fun and spontaneous but also try to find ways of communicating with the other person to make sure that you and they are both into it (and can stop if you want). Really pay attention to them. Look for body language, eye contact, facial expressions that kind of thing”

Notice what happens in the room and then ask some of these questions

“How was that handshake?”

“How did it compare with the first two?”

“On a scale of one to ten how was it?”

“Think about how you communicated to each other about the handshake. What did you do or say? Play it back in your head in super slow motion. What happened?”

People might think about

• how they stood
• how they looked at each other
• how ‘in tune’ they were with the other person
• whether they copied or mirrored what the other person was doing
• how the moments of connection and disconnection felt
• what kind of words they might have used
• the noises they made
• how the facial expressions were

Often the ‘third handshake’ was the preferred handshake of the group. Ask the group to think of why this is. Usually they say that they really felt a connection this time.

I sometimes then ask people to do another ‘third handshake’ but this time with someone they haven’t shook hands with yet. This is to test whether we can have a really good mutually enjoyable handshake with someone that we have never shaken hands with before.

The sub-text

“So this is all about consent. You might know that consent means agreeing to do something. Sex without consent is rape or sexual assault. Also someone has to be able to give their capacity to consent. This means that if someone is drunk or nearly unconscious or felt they weren’t able to say ‘no’ then it’s not consensual. Also, just because someone hasn’t said ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘yes.’ So if someone says ‘no’ you should stop.”

“However what does consent feel like and how do we have sex we actually might want to have? You’ve all been able to practice how good consent feels.”

“So when people have the first kind of handshake they are shaking hands in the way that they are expected to, or they just take part in someone else’s handshake. Often when people have sex they take a ‘first handshake’ approach. They often don’t (or can’t) negotiate or say what they want but rely on the script for what counts as sex. Sex in this case might mean ‘one thing leads to another.’ ‘Foreplay’ and then ‘intercourse’ (like penis or toys in vagina or anus).”

“This approach works for some people and some people like that kind of sex because it can be spontaneous and exciting. However sometimes it can lead to rubbish sex because people aren’t able to talk about what they actually like or they don’t have bodies that can enjoy that kind of sex. Sometimes it can result in sex that isn’t consenting: either like feeling forced to take part in someone else’s handshake, or doing it because it’s expected, or one thing leading to another without anyone checking in that this is what you wanted.”

That’s quite a lot so make sure people have understood that. Then explain …

“However if people were more ‘second handshake’ about sex then it would be really difficult to have sex because everything would have to be negotiated. There might be so much negotiation about every single thing (kissing, touching, words, taking clothes off etc) that it would take away a lot of the fun and spontaneity. Sometimes being a bit ‘second handshake’ is important and some people are able to talk about sex like this. There are ways to be second handshake when we’re planning sex with someone – such as texting what we like, or talking together about different kinds of sex we might want to try. However a lot of people find this really difficult.”

“So, the key is to be more ‘third handshake.’ This means really paying attention to what each other wants and trying to make it mutually pleasurable. So focus on the tiny micro-communications of the other person: eye contact, nodding or shaking heads, facial expressions, noises, short words or phrases like “oh yeah” or “bit softer,” how bodies move towards or against each other, moving hands etc.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Are there times when you feel like you can’t say no to a handshake? Did that happen in this lesson? Why?

How might how we feel about ourselves affect how much we feel we can have the sex (or handshakes) that we actually want to have?

Think about the words used to describe different people who have sex – what difference would that make? For instance, what are sexually active men called compared with what sexually active women are called?

What makes asking for the sex you want (or don’t want) more difficult? What makes it easier?

Are there times when it’s better to talk more than others?

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