Building a Culture of Consent

Building a culture of consent is imperative for preventing violence in our communities. 

When you hear the word consent, do you automatically think about sex? Maybe you took one of those awkward seminars or workshops in college where you saw students act out being drunk at a party, and someone was unable to consent to a hookup in that moment. Maybe you’ve heard the mantra “No means no.” Maybe you saw that tea video from eleven years ago that compared consent to tea. In the world of sexual violence prevention, especially in our rape culture, consent is definitely important to address. However, consent has much broader implications in the way our society operates and how power and control manifest within it.

We consent to all types of things that aren’t sexual: accepting hugs from people who introduce themselves as “huggers,” taking photos of strangers in public, allowing companies to sell our information and track our activities online, using our intellectual property to train artificial intelligence, paying taxes, and having our government use those tax dollars to fund wars and genocide. You may be thinking that we do not consent to these things, that we are powerless to opt out because that is a requirement for belonging to this society. We may feel like we have little choice in the matter because that is just the way things are, how the world works, and the nature of humans.

But passive acceptance due to overt and covert exercises of power is not consent. In many areas of our society, we cannot fully consent because our choices are intentionally constrained by the systems governing our lives. Our government enacts laws that aren’t always just that we must follow, or the carceral state will lock us away. Greedy corporations force us to work for fractional wages so we can turn around and buy housing, food, and healthcare from these same corporations. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy organize power in our society, leaving us feeling powerless to change how we want to participate as individuals.

We may feel internalized pressure to conform to these norms because we don’t want to lose community. We may participate in respectability politics by conforming to European standards of beauty and professionalism, despite how our bodies naturally look. We may present our gender in a way that doesn’t align with who we know ourselves to be, but choose conformity because we will be harmed otherwise. We may stay silent regarding political issues that hurt people, or even participate in the harm, because we feel powerless to do otherwise. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy have groomed us to ignore our own power.

The ability to say no becomes much more complicated when saying no carries consequences.

A culture of consent requires respecting other people’s ability to make decisions about their own lives. When we ignore someone’s boundaries, pressure them into participation, or use our position to limit their choices, we undermine that ability. The same is true when institutions constrain people’s options and call that participation voluntary. Building a culture of consent means recognizing that no one is entitled to another person’s body, labor, information, or compliance.

At the heart of liberation lies true agency and self-sovereignty, and consent allows for the container to respect the agency and self-sovereignty of everyone.

RELATED: I became a sex and consent educator with Black youth in mind

Building a culture of consent means thinking about the conditions that allow people to make meaningful choices  in the first place. It requires all of us to think about how we ask community to show up in our lives. Notice I said ask–not demand, not expect, not force. And for us to feel comfortable with asking and receiving, we must trust each other. That trust takes communication, and building that trust can start as small as talking to our neighbors. 

There is a lot for us to learn and unlearn when communicating with and trusting our community. We live in a white supremacist, patriarchal, and racial capitalist society that thrives when we are in constant competition with each other and have such a level of distrust that we focus on individualist values and private ownership. We are taught to value greed and hoard our resources, for if we don’t, we are told we won’t survive (or don’t deserve to survive). How can we build that trust and culture of consent when we suffer in isolation fueled by mistrust?

With a foundation of communication and trust, we can be more vulnerable. Consent takes vulnerability, that you trust the person asking for consent to cause you no harm. That isn’t to say that harm will never come our way. When harm does occur, we need processes of accountability rooted in care and that involves the community, not just the individuals affected. Accountability, whether through restorative or transformative justice or some other process of community accountability, is so important in a culture of consent because it allows repair in broken trust and encourages vulnerability once more. Accountability prevents our culture of consent from dissolving after harm occurs.

RELATED: Reimaging consent, for Black cis-het men, in a world where touch can kill

We build a culture of consent when we understand the conditions shaping our choices, participate in the decisions that affect our lives, and create alternatives when the options in front of us are not enough. We will cause harm to one another at times, but accountability, communication, and repair allow us to rebuild trust and continue the work.

If consent is about meaningful choice, then building a culture of consent requires more than changing individual behavior. It requires challenging the conditions that limit our choices in the first place. It requires relationships rooted in trust, communities willing to practice accountability, and institutions that do not depend on coercion to function.

Building a culture of consent happens through the everyday decisions we make about how we treat one another and how we share power.