Student Special – Consent: "Rather than being this thing that makes everything really awkward, or makes for a worse time, it’s completely the opposite"

The first semester of college is an exciting time, with opportunities for learning, personal growth, new relationships and increased independence. However, amidst all this novelty, there is also what experts and academics have come to refer as “The Red Zone” – a time of statistically heightened instances of sexual assault on college campuses.

On university campuses, it seems the times students are most vulnerable to sexual assault are respectively: (a) during Fresher’s Week; and (b) in the first year of college. Although every student, regardless of age or gender, is at risk to one degree or another, first-year females are at an increased risk. While instances of assault from strangers can occur, an acquaintance is a more likely culprit.

Colleges have implemented a range of measures to combat this trend, one of them being a nationwide partnership with We-Consent. This national three-year consent campaign – which aims to drive behavioural change and spark conversations about sexual consent across the board – kicked off last year.

Consent Workshops

Led by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC), the campaign is designed to clarify what sexual consent means and how it is given. As such, the campaign is more concerned with cultural change than with legal or policy shifts. But the hope is that a greater cultural awareness of sex, combined with seeing consent as an avenue to prompt wider discussions about sex and sexuality, will open us up to more pleasurable, more open and more honest sex.

We-Consent project manager Sarah Monaghan believes the campaign is a really positive one that’s highly relevant to students.

“College is a time where you have a newfound freedom,” Sarah says. “You’re at a new phase of your life, you are often living on your own, making a lot more decisions, maybe going out more, and drinking more in situations where you are potentially vulnerable to other people.

“Sex education in Ireland has not been strong,” she elaborates. “Thankfully that is changing now, but it is not something that we have focused on a huge amount. The fact is that people of college age have not been well equipped to understand consent, to talk about it, to keep it as a priority.”

How do ‘We-Consent’ explain consent, then? Monaghan defines it as, “A freely-given voluntary agreement between people where each person says or expresses – because consent can absolutely be non-verbal – what they want and what they don’t want and has that heard and respected.”

The campaign has worked with a number of universities, including UCD and DCU, to put in place information stands, establishing an approachable pathway for students to learn more about consent, with an arsenal of leaflets, resources and conversations to avail of. Monaghan says that their free consent workshops, in particular, have been implemented on campuses to positive effect.

“We run these workshops regularly with different colleges across the country,” she says. “They are open, but guided, spaces for people to talk about consent and everything that comes with it: sex, relationships, power dynamics, compliance and coercion, and how thinking has evolved on these different issues.

“The name for our campaign, We-Consent, came from the idea that it’s an agreement,” she adds. “It’s something we do together. It’s not something you get off someone. It’s not something you give to someone.”

Small Check-Ins

In an ideal world, people would be able to have open discussions about sex. But the historic stigmatisation of sex in Ireland, largely as a result of religious indoctrination which pegged it as 'sinful', has fed into sex education in schools – and indeed at home. A big concern among young people is the awkwardness that so many of them feel when it comes to verbalising about sex, and about sexual boundaries. Even while acknowledging its necessity, many students feel that it is something of a mood killer.

“The first thing I’d say to people is that you’re not alone in that feeling,” says Monaghan. “The majority of people in Ireland feel absolutely mortified at talking about sex with anyone, especially with the person they’re about to have sex with – and even more so if it’s a new person. So it’s understandable that we are where we are. We don’t have the background of having a lot of openness about sex in in Ireland.

“People tend to think that it has to be one long, serious conversation,” she continues. “By all means, it can be – but small check-ins are really what you’re looking for. It should come from both sides. It could just be saying, ‘Is that alright?’; ‘Do you like that?’; ‘Are you okay?’; ‘Do you want to keep going’. It can also be done non-verbally, by way of just checking in and being aware of the other person’s body language.

“Rather than being this thing that makes everything really awkward, or makes for a worse time, it’s completely the opposite. Because you’re now more aware, and don’t have to guess. That makes for a way better time!”

For more information on We-Consent and their workshops, visit their Resource Hub: www.we-consent.ie/resource-hub

Read the full Student Special in the current issue of Hot Press – out now: