Opinion: Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh has put the focus firmly on the issue of consent
As Noeline Blackwell of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre recently observed, the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh was both "extraordinary" and "typical." Extraordinary, perhaps, in terms of the scale of international coverage and tangible stakes of the testimony’s outcomes for U.S. citizens. But typical in terms of both the ubiquity of sexual assault, harassment and rape as an experience of women worldwide across many cultural contexts and the intense positive and negative reaction to Blasey Ford’s allegations. Extraordinary is a description we urgently need to challenge as we consider this case’s meaning in the current global political and social landscape.
The World Health Organisation reported in 2017 that one in three (35 percent) of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Last year, a study at NUI Galway, on which I was a co-author, found that 39 percent of female students had experienced sexual coercion and 70 percent reported sexual hostility and/or crude gender harassment by their third year in college.
Last week, it was reported that three female students attending University College Cork and Cork Institute of Technology had reported rapes to the Cork Sexual Violence Centre since the beginning of the autumn semester. It's a shocking statistic in and of itself, but even more so when we consider how drastically underreported both rape and sexual assault are in Ireland and internationally.
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From RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland, Mary Crilly, Head of the Sexual Violence Centre in Cork, on reports that three first-year female students have been allegedly raped in Cork since the start of the academic year
I was born in the United States, live in Ireland and am a dual American-Irish citizen. I attended college in the early 2000s when decades of feminist activism insured that anti-sexual violence university and peer/activist education programmes were in place and well-resourced. Counselling for survivors of rape and sexual assault was openly available, I took part in "Take Back the Night" marches and attended first-year orientation sessions where these issues were discussed openly and candidly in mixed-gender groups.
"No means no," we chanted. We were warned about the "red zone," the risky first few months when universities are in session which typically see on-campus spikes in the reporting of rape and sexual assault, a pattern which last week’s Cork revelations again confirmed in an Irish context.
At this time, the statistic I heard regularly was one in four, that one in four women would be sexually assaulted during their lifetimes. As my time in college and then graduate school progressed, the statistical occurrence amongst my peer group and then later as disclosed to me by students, colleagues, and friends seemed in fact much higher than that.
This is just not good enough. We need to change how we are approaching conversations about sexuality, gender and power in everyday life
Over almost 20 years, this one in four statistic remains the one that I still hear quoted in the US. The 2002 SAVI survey in Ireland similarly identified that one in five Irish women and one in 10 Irish men have experienced sexual assault during their lifetime, with our more recent NUI Galway campus surveys confirming these general numbers more recently. This means that we have not appreciably reduced rates of sexual assault and rape within a generation, despite steady gains in women’s rights and sexual freedoms legally and socially.
This is just not good enough. We need to change how we are approaching conversations about sexuality, gender and power in everyday life and not just sexual assault and rape. For me - as a researcher, educator, activist and member of the interdisciplinary SMART Consent research team at NUI Galway - the consent sexual health paradigm offers extraordinary hope in terms of offering a new language of the typical that we might practice more actively within our sexual relationships.
In the research we’ve carried out over the last five years, we’ve distilled what we mean by consent down to a four-letter acronym: Consent=OMFG (Ongoing, Mutual, and Freely-Given), a definition to be applied across relationships, genders and sexualities.
Consent is ongoing, it can be withdrawn at any time. Consent is mutual, not one-sided, shared between two (or more) parties. Consent is freely-given by both parties, not under the heavy influence of drink and/or drugs and/or obtained as a result of unequal or coercive power relationships. The Blasey Ford/Kavanagh hearings, suggest that the alleged perpetrators involved were not carrying this layered understanding of consent with them into the room where this event allegedly occurred. If they had been, the outcomes here could have been very different.
By shifting the conversation and our sexual practices towards consent as a matter of course, and not just in extraordinary situations where a crime has allegedly occurred, I think we stand a better chance at actually reducing the statistics above rather than only having these debates around "extraordinary" or media-worthy cases. By making consent an everyday conversation and embedding it as a guiding principle of sexual health from primary to secondary to third-level education in Ireland, we have an opportunity to take people where they’re at and have a pragmatic conversation about the grey (and not so grey) areas we might face when communicating with our sexual partners.
Our process of communication will always be shaped by the gendered and social norms we bring into the bedroom with us, but we can challenge these together without sacrificing sexual pleasure in the process. We might start by just simply remembering consent is always a four-letter concept: Consent= OMFG (Ongoing, Mutual and Freely-Given).
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
