Rethinking consent with continuums: sex, ethics and young people

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, there has been growing awareness about issues of sexual consent. This has resulted in a global shift towards prioritising education and campaigns which address consent and sexual violence. Yet much discourse about consent continues to reinforce legalistic and binary notions of consent/rape which do not map onto young people’s experiences of navigating sex and relationships. This paper draws on findings from an innovative 2-year participatory action research project about sexual consent with young people that involved a series of educational and action-based projects at seven sites in Southern England. By drawing on important feminist work about continuums, this paper considers the generative potential of theorising and teaching about consent using the device of a continuum. It offers insight into how young people construct consent and develops an expanded model of consent using ‘continuum thinking’. Findings suggest the need to encourage and embrace a wider variety of terminology regarding consent and sexual violence in order to invite more people into the consent conversation.

KEYWORDS:

• Consent
• continuum
• youth
• sexual violence
• Sex Education

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the participants who collaborated in the research and the input, support and advice of practitioners at each site. Thanks also to reviewers and to Rachel Thomson and Francesca Zanatta for constructively commenting on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Throughout this paper, the terms ethics and ethical are used in line with Moira Carmody’s work on sexual ethics (Carmody 2015). This draws attention to the individual, interpersonal and structural contexts of sexuality rather than specific behaviours and acts.

2. For work that captures the complexity of youth sexual agency, see Cense (2019b).

3. Brook is the UK’s largest Sexual Health and Wellbeing charity for young people.

4. Many of these activities have been developed into training and educational resources for educators. These are available at Brook Learn: learn.brook.org.uk/

Additional information

Funding

This research was co-funded by the sexual health and wellbeing charity Brook and The Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth at the University of Sussex.