Showing posts with label no. Show all posts
Showing posts with label no. Show all posts
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Tuesday 28 August 2012
What Sexual Consent Really Means
How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?
Reports from youth workers suggest that many young people are confused as to what constitutes rape. But recent events show that they are not the only ones
Many young people believe that sex education comprises "too little, too late" Photograph: Rex Features
"Young people will describe scenarios where, I think 'this sounds abusive'," says Rhiannon Holder, a youth worker for Brook, the sexual advisory service for young people and co-chair of Bread, a Bristol youth project.
"They're not sure if they had sex or they wanted sex – and if they did have sex they're not sure if they consented to it. As professionals, we're having to reflect to young people [that some] of the situations they have experienced could be labelled as sexual bullying or assault, or rape."
With politicians such as George Galloway and Tony Benn spouting shameful ideas of what consent means (having sex with someone who is asleep is "bad sexual etiquette", not rape, according to Galloway), a worryingly high proportion of the adult public doesn't seem to grasp it either. A survey for Amnesty found 37% of respondents thought a woman was responsible for being raped if she didn't say "no" clearly enough. With attitudes like this, is it any surprise young people may be dangerously confused?
They certainly seem to be. Only 69% of young men would not try to have sex with someone who did not want to, and one in 20 said they would try to have sex with someone who was asleep, according to a shocking 2010 survey of young people aged between 18 and 25 by the Havens, the specialist London-based sexual assault referral centres. A significant proportion also seemed confused about what constitutes rape: only 77% of young men agreed that having sex with someone who has said no was rape. While in 2009, a study for the NSPCC found a third of girls aged between 13 and 17 who were in relationships had experienced unwanted sexual acts, and one in 16 had been raped.
So, what needs to change? "Too often [consent] is viewed as a simple yes or no, and it's much more complex than that," says Holder. "I don't think many young people are offered the opportunity to explore all of the factors involved in giving consent: peer pressure, alcohol and drugs, self-esteem, coercion, gender issues."
When Holder does workshops with young people, she asks them to consider different scenarios, "and generate discussion around what it means to be in a relationship; what it means to have safe and positive sex. For instance, we would look at situations where you have had sex with someone before, or if you've kissed somebody; does that mean youhave to go on and have sex? Also it's about taking responsibility for consent, so making it clear it's not just the person who has the responsibility for saying 'yes'. Young men should actively be seeking consent."
It isn't just about the words, she says. "We'll explore what 'yes' does, and doesn't, look like."
"Often people don't say 'no' but they'll say 'that hurts', or 'not yet', or 'I don't like it'. Or it might be in their body language," she adds.
Then there are the assumptions about timing, she says. "A lot of the young people I have met are shocked that you can revoke consent – you might have had sex with somebody before, or started a sexual act, but that doesn't mean the sex can't stop at any time.
"I've spoken to young people who have said they didn't really want to do it, but they didn't know how to say 'no' or 'stop'."
Whitney Iles, a community activist, agrees. She thinks many young people are confused by "so many different messages. On one side, you're told about how you should have sex within a loving relationship, on the other side you can see how pop culture is highly sexualised. It's a real confusion over identity and value of self, which then makes it harder to know what you want and where the line is. There is a blurred line of what is normal, or what has become normalised, and what is crossing a line."
Earlier this year, the government launched an online and TV advertising campaign to educate teenagers about rape, and consent, but it seems a poor substitute for good sex education in schools. The problem, says Simon Blake, chief executive of Brook, is that sex education "is incredibly patchy, and what young people have been saying for a really long time is 'too little, too late, too biological'."
The Labour government failed to do enough to make personal, social, health and economics education (PSHE), of which sex and relationships education (SRE) is a part, a statutory requirement for schools. "Although secondary schools have to teach some SRE, virtually nothing is specified and there is no agreed curriculum for it, so schools can teach what they like," says Jane Lees, chair of the Sex Education Forum.
The government's review of PSHE, which ended last year, is still to report, but things could get even worse, Lees fears. "Our concern is that it is likely to slim it down much more, or reduce the expectation that schools will teach it," she says. "When the coalition came in and started the review of PSHE, one of the issues that they raised was about consent, so it is on their minds but we still have no final outcomes from it. We're in limbo at the moment."
"A lot of young people are growing up without really knowing what consent means," says Whitney Iles. "But then I think a lot of adults don't really know either."
Tuesday 3 January 2012
The power to say no
Pritish Nandy02 January 2012, 09:18 PM IST
My worst failing is my inability to say No. This year I intend to correct that. I will clearly and unequivocally say No when I want to. Not a Maybe or a Perhaps; a straight, categorical No.
For people like me it’s not easy. We were brought up being told that No is impolite, rude, and politically incorrect. There are nicer ways to turn down a request. You can gently fob it off. Or procrastinate. Or do what my friend Husain, the painter, always did. He said Yes to everything and promptly disappeared. Poof! People have waited for him to inaugurate an event in London while he went off to New York for a party. No, Husain never allowed a commitment, any commitment to burden him. He happily failed each, knowing fully that he will be forgiven for his indiscretions. He blamed it on his poor memory. But memory had nothing to do with it. Insouciance did.
My friend Mario was identical. He did hundreds of cartoons for me when I was editor, but never on time. Give Mario a deadline and you could be sure he will miss it. He completed every assignment but in his own time. I remember he once came to me with a cartoon so late that I had forgotten what it was for. But no, he never said No. He was always polite, always proper and agreed to any deadline I set him because he knew he would not have to keep to it. We decided to do a book together, of naughty limericks, largely based on Indian politics. I waited three years for him to complete the drawings. By the time they were ready, I had lost the manuscript. (We didn’t have computers in those days and typescripts were easy to lose.)
I smoked my first cigarette at 7 because I couldn’t say No. I downed my first whisky at 9, smoked grass at 11, all because I couldn’t say No. Luckily I found it all quite boring and so, by the time I was 16, it was all over and I was ready to take on life on my own terms. Minor addictions have never distracted me since. I listen to Vivaldi, read Dylan Thomas, try to figure out why Damien Hirst is such a vastly over rated artist. I can spend all day listening to Mallikarjun Mansur and marvelling at his genius if only I can say No to a million silly, irrelevant commitments I pick up, for people I barely know.
My father died because he couldn’t say No to a doctor, a family friend in Jabalpur who convinced him that prostrate surgery was the easiest thing on earth, and he could do it in his own nursing home. By the time I heard of it and rushed there, he was already in a coma from which he never recovered. We finally pulled the plug on him. My mother lost our family home in Kolkata because she couldn’t say No to her landlord, who requested her to give up her decades old tenancy because his family had grown, needed more space. Even before she packed up her meagre belongings and came to me here, the landlord had sold off the house. Yes. Life makes suckers of us all. Especially those prone to saying Yes.
I was reading the cover story in a news magazine recently which argued that the most important thing you can tell your doctor is No. Most people suffer because they say Yes and get lumped with medication they don’t need, tests that are not necessary, and surgeries they could have done without. This is true at the dinner table as well, or in a restaurant. The more often you say No to the lip smacking food there, the better your health will be. The day we can say No to all the candidates when voting, the quality of our politicians will improve.
Life is a honey trap. Everyone’s waiting for you to say Yes. The moment you do, you are entrapped by absolute, arrant nonsense, breathtakingly packaged, aggressively promoted, seductively laid out in front of you, and completely irrelevant to your life or well being. The wise man says No. The fool succumbs. 2012 is my year to say No. An emphatic, easy No. Like Eric Bana told his handler in the last scene of Spielberg’s masterpiece, Munich. If a patriot who risked his life hunting down terrorists can say that, so can you and I.
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