Sexual violence & teaching consent
Sexual violence against women is a pervasive and historically persistent global problem. In other words, it is everywhere. Statistics reveal it to be a systemic global issue. Described by the World Health Organisation as an ‘epidemic’, findings of their 2013 report reveal that overall, 35% of women worldwide have experienced sexual violence. Locally, in Australia, over the age of 15, one in five women (compared with one in 20 men) have experienced sexual violence, and it is young women (aged 18-24) that continue to be at highest risk of experiencing sexual violence.
At Learning Consent we use the term sexual violence as an umbrella term. Rather than marking out distinct categories of sexual violence, such as ‘rape’ or ‘assault’, we use academic Liz Kelly’s ‘Continuum of Sexual Violence’ (1987) to conceptualise women’s experiences of sexual violence.
The Continuum of Sexual Violence (1987) is based on in-depth interviews with 60 women, and a further 48 follow up interviews with the same women, most of which had had an experience of sexual violence. Her research illustrates that women’s experiences of heterosexual sex ‘are not either consenting or rape, but exist on a continuum moving from choice to pressure to coercion to force’ (1987, 134). Kelly’s continuum, whilst not all encompassing, marks an important shift away from dualistic conceptualisations of consent. It enables a more nuanced reading of ambiguous sexual encounters. It also accounts for the less overt structural forces (beyond women’s control) that impact on women’s experiences of sex.
For example, ‘pressurised sex' covers active-passive scenarios in which women choose not to say no, but in which they are not freely consenting. These are stories of sex whereby the woman has had sex ‘not because they wanted to but because they felt it would be inappropriate to refuse’ (Petretic-Jackson, 1987, 306). However, consent is still not as simple as classifying sexual encounters into four categories rather than two. Kelly makes the point that each of those four categories ‘shade into one another’ (1987, 134). On this matter Kelly writes:
This point is relevant to recent discussions of pleasure and danger as two opposing frameworks within which women’s experiences of sex are conceptualised by feminists. The concept of a continuum suggests that pleasure and danger are not mutually exclusive opposites but the desirable and undesirable ends, respectively, of a continuum of experience.
This is a radically different framework for understanding sexual violence than the common dualistic framework that implies two simplistic categories of either consensual sex or rape. When teaching consent to young people, we have found the continuum approach most useful for exploring the complexities of young people’s experiences of negotiating sexual consent.
