Sexual Consent and Its Contexts

Consent is more complicated than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This chapter serves as an introduction to many of the central ideas around consent in current cultures. It identifies the ways consent, violence, and coercion were and are conceptualised. It seeks to problematise simple concepts of consent and to highlight the ways power and authority influence consent. Our contemporary landscape retains important historical legacies that have left significant holes in social ideas of bodily authority and sexual autonomy. To better understand these gaps and omissions, this chapter traces the long history of consent and non-consent within social, cultural, and legal frameworks. For instance, across the nineteenth century, expectations of physical violence and force were slowly written out of the statutes surrounding rape: consent, rather than physical violence, became the criteria that distinguished sexual assault. Nonetheless, in the absence of physical violence, it remained almost impossible to convict an offender of rape, and force remained central to the way rape was ‘proven’ at trial. As this chapter explores, ideas about consent shifted over time and place, but many understandings remained resistant to change.