Breda O’Brien: Consent alone will not help our children

In some ways, Minister for Education Richard Bruton’s proposal to include lessons on consent in sex education at primary level is uncontroversial. Consent is the minimum standard for sexual behaviour and we can see the dreadful consequences everywhere of ignoring this minimum standard.

Children are living lives saturated with explicit sexual imagery and they need ways to navigate this culture.

While schools cannot be expected to counter single-handedly a culture of exploitative sex, they can play some role in highlighting more positive and respectful attitudes.

Parents need to be involved in the design of the new modules and to take more responsibility for communicating with their children about sex on a developmentally appropriate level.

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However, if we are expecting consent to operate not just as a minimum but a maximum standard for sexual behaviour, then that is an entirely different and probably dangerously naive approach.

There is a very strong strand in our culture which suggests that anything that happens between consenting adults is fine and that any attempt to say otherwise is trying to impose control through shame.

Porn industry

In this world view, consent is enough, but we only have to look at one of the world’s biggest online industries to see that consent is not enough.

The porn industry is a multibillion-dollar business. In 2016, Time magazine reported that in a study of behaviours in popular porn, nearly 90 per cent of 304 random scenes contained physical aggression towards women, who nearly always responded neutrally or with pleasure.

Worse, “women would sometimes beg their partners to stop, then acquiesce and begin to enjoy the activity, regardless of how painful or debasing”.

However, in most cases, the people taking part in pornography have given their consent and those who are viewing it, for the most part, have consented to do so.

As a result, many people are unwilling to suggest that there is anything wrong with porn. But as a friend of mine says, if you abstracted sex from the equation and instead people were just viewing videos of humiliation, throttling, dominance and brutality, people would not be so quick to suggest that it is all fine.  But if it is directed to a sexual purpose it somehow becomes beyond question.

While there is little concrete evidence that viewing porn increases rates of rape, it is more than likely doing something else -– normalising a very misogynistic view of sex.

It is simply naive to expect that people can give adequate consent when they have been exposed to pornography at an age when their views of sexuality are being formed.

Consent becomes problematic when the dominant world view is that sex is a purely physical phenomenon, to be enjoyed whenever people want it in whatever way they want it, so long as consent is present.

Consent is a minimum requirement but respect demands much more

The implicit suggestion is that anyone who is hesitant about partaking in sex has been brainwashed by some kind of puritanical, probably religious, but definitely indefensible moralistic viewpoint.

So there is a pressure on people to be up for sex at all times and the question then becomes: why are you not up for sex with me when you were up for it with these other people?

At its crudest, this becomes a form of bullying pressure to have sex when the other person does not want to. At a more sophisticated but equally repellent level, it leads to a culture of manipulating women (or men) to give consent, because consent is all that matters, right?

All kinds of emotional manipulation and pressure are applied to obtain consent in what blogger Leah Libresco  terms "rape-adjacent" behaviour – not quite rape but in the vicinity of it, despite consent in some form being given.

Respect

Nor are consent and respect interchangeable concepts. Consent is a minimum requirement but respect demands much more.

Respect means wanting what is good for the other person.

Take two 14-year-olds. If he knows what school she goes to and some of her friends, but is hazy on her surname, it is unlikely that by expecting her to drop to her knees and give him oral sex outside a disco that he is wanting what is good for her.

While many people would think that two 14-year-olds should not be having oral sex at all, a world view that prioritises consent can only say that it is fine so long as they are both ready for it, using condoms and actively giving consent.

Yet so many things affect the ability to give full consent: absorbing misogynistic attitudes from porn, drinking too much, wanting to be liked, or fear of being seen as frigid. It is naive to think that an ethic of consent alone will allow people to navigate these complexities.

Meanwhile, parents are often at a loss, but they need to step up and take responsibility, firstly by setting clear standards and maintaining good lines of communication with their children, no matter how awkward that is.

In that context, discussing consent in school in a way that is appropriate for very young people is a good step, even if it is only one step, towards mutually respectful relationships.